Kment - Counterfactuals and The Analysis of Necessity

Philosophical Perspectives, 20, Metaphysics, 2006
COUNTERFACTUALS AND THE ANALYSIS OF NECESSITY
Boris Kment
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
This paper is, in part, a straightforward exercise in philosophical analysis: I
will try to define metaphysical necessity. But I will combine this aim with another:
I want to know which cognitive practices of ordinary life gave rise to the concept
of necessity, and what role the notion plays in these practices. Let me describe
this goal in more detail, before giving an overview of my strategy.
1. Goals and overview

1.1. Internal and External Perspectives
Although the expression metaphysical necessity is a technical term of
analytic philosophy, I think that non-philosophers usually either have an inchoate,
implicit grasp of the concept expressed by it, or can at least very easily be gotten
to cotton on when the concept is explained to them, even if they are not given
an explicit definition. When presenting a highly intelligent person without philosophical background with a carefully designed series of thought experiments,
we might get her to say, I could not have been born of different parents. A
person with different parents would not have been me. (This is essentially what
happened to me a couple of years ago as I conversed with a very intelligent
non-philosopher about some moral issues concerning human cloning.) I also
remember that Kripkes examples in Naming and Necessity and his conclusions
about the necessity of origin immediately struck a chord in me when I first read
the book as an undergraduate, long before I had a developed philosophical notion
of metaphysical necessity or had learned to carefully distinguish epistemic from
metaphysical necessity. I think that this suggests that the concept of metaphysical
necessity in some sense arises out of certain ordinary-life practices of thinking
and talking.
If this is correct, then a comprehensive philosophical account of modality
should not only tell us what metaphysical necessity is, but should also tell us
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which ordinary-life practices give rise to modal notions, and what role modal
concepts play in them. It should thereby elucidate what the purpose of these
notions is, why creatures with our interests and concerns have developed them.
In this way, a comprehensive theory of modality should combine a theory of
necessity with a theory of the practice of modalizing. The point can be explained
by the metaphor of the difference between an internal and an external viewpoint.
Before we start to philosophize about necessity, we have an implicit theory
about it. The philosopher provides this pre-philosophical system of beliefs about
modality with a foundation, and refines, extends and corrects it from within. He
acts as a participant in our practice of modalizing; his standpoint is internal to
this practice. But the philosopher should also make the practice of modalizing
itself an object of study. He should, as it were, take a standpoint external to the
practice, in order to describe the practice, and explain what its function is, why it
exists.
It is a familiar fact that these two kinds of interest can pull in opposite
directions. If we concentrate exclusively on the task of giving a metaphysical
account of what necessity is, we might end up with a theory that makes it
hard to explain why we are interested in modality. It is a common charge
whether it is justified or not I shall not endeavor to decideagainst Lewiss
account of necessity that it fails in just this way.1 Philosophers have objected
that, even if there were other worlds in Lewiss sense, we would have no apparent
reason to be interested in what goes on in them. Hence, Lewiss account, so the
objection continues, makes it a mystery why we should bother to think about
modal facts. At the other end of the spectrum there are theories that do well
at explaining the purpose of our modal notions, but do so at the expense of
giving implausible accounts of what necessity is. Consider the conventionalist
theory that for a proposition to be necessary is for it to owe its truth to a
convention, perhaps the convention that we ought to regard the proposition as
true come what may. If some propositions are indeed conventionally exempted
from empirical testing, then it benefits our epistemic practices if we possess
a concept that singles them out. The conventionalist therefore has no great
difficulty with explaining the point of our modal notions. But this advantage
is purchased at the price of several well-known drawbacks in her theory of
necessity.
The task is thus to develop an approach to modality that permits us to
achieve both of our goals, a credible metaphysical theory of necessity and a
plausible account of the practice of modalizing. I think that the best way of doing
this is not to neglect either objective while pursuing the other, but to integrate
the two goals in a single enterprise: an account of the nature of metaphysical
necessity can be guided by a hypothesis about the ordinary-life practice in which
the concept of necessity originated, while assumptions about what necessity is can
in turn suggest ways of developing ones ideas about the practice of modalizing.
This is the methodology I will employ.
Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 239
1.2. Overview of the Project

In trying to find a plausible metaphysical account of necessity, we may
naturally start from one or the other of two intuitions about what necessity
is. On the one hand, there is the intuition that modal discourse, talk about
which things could or could not have been different, is concerned with situations
other than the one that actually obtains, with alternatives to the way things are.
Talk about whether something could have been different essentially concerns
the question whether there is an alternative to the way things are in which the
thing is different. Call this the otherworldliness intuition. On the other hand, it
seems appealing to say that the core difference between a truth that could have
been false and one that could not have been false is that the truth of the latter is
somehow more metaphysically secure than that of the former, more unshakable, or
inexorable (to borrow a term that Edward Craig used to articulate the intuition).
The literature on modality abounds with passages that give expression to this
intuition.2 According to this idea, necessity is at bottom a special mode of truth,
a special way of being true, namely that of being true in an especially secure and
inexorable way. I will call this the modalist intuition.
As Peter Railton very helpfully suggested to me, the images underlying the
otherworldliness and modalist intuitions are, respectively, that of freedom and
that of force. According to the otherworldliness intuition, the range of possibilities
circumscribes what we may call the degrees of freedom of the world (in the same
sense in which we speak of the degrees of freedom of a physical system). The
necessary truths impose restrictions on the degrees of freedom; they restrict the
range of alternatives to the way the world actually is. According to the modalist
intuition, there is a certain special force that attaches to those propositions that
are necessary, and which secures their truth.
Different philosophers take different modal notions as basic. One group defines the modal operatorsnecessarily, possibly, and so forthby quantifying
over possible situations. To say that it is possible that Fred has black hair is to
say that there exists a possible situation in which Fred has black hair. Others
take the modal operators to be basic and prefer to define the notion of a possible
situation by using these operators, e.g. by identifying possible situations with
sets of propositions that could have been jointly true. I suspect that each of
these approaches is guided by one of the intuitions described in the previous
paragraphs. If one assumes that modal discourse is ultimately about alternatives
to the way things are, then it becomes natural to analyze the modal operators
by quantifying over these alternatives, i.e. over possible situations. On the other
hand, if one starts from the modalist intuition, then it is tempting to regard the
concept of the special mode of truth characterized above as the most basic notion
of modal discourse. Now, if one regards the necessity operator as expressing the
property of having this special mode of truth (so that the sentence necessarily,
P is an ascription of this special mode of truth to the claim P), then it appears
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natural to regard the necessity operator as expressing the most basic concept of
modal discourse, and to define other modal notions (like that of a possible world)
in terms of modal operators.3,4
I think that both intuitions, the otherworldliness intuition and the modalist
intuition, are very forceful, and I believe that a plausible metaphysical account of
modality needs to be capable of accommodating both intuitions. It is important
to be clear about what is required in order to accommodate them. I take both
the otherworldliness intuition and the modalist intuition to be intuitions about
what it is for a proposition to be necessary. According to the first intuition, to
be necessary just is to be true in all scenarios that are alternatives to the way
things actually are; according to the modalist intuition, it is to be true in some
particularly secure and inexorable way. Now suppose that we propose, as our
account of necessity, that to be necessary is to be F (for some predicate F ). In
order for this view to accommodate the two intuitions it is not sufficient that it
can be shown that the propositions that have the property of F-ness are just those
that are true in all alternatives to the way things are, or that the propositions that
are F are just those whose truth is particularly secure in the sense underlying the
modalist intuition. Rather, the property of F-ness must be (identical with) the
property of being true in all alternatives to the way things are, and it must be
(identical with) the property of being true in a particularly secure way. In order
to accommodate both intuitions, we need to find some way of interpreting the
phrases true in all alternatives to the way things are and true in a particularly
inexorable way on which the two phrases single out the same property, and then
identify necessity with that property.
My attempt to do this starts from the otherworldliness intuition. I argue
for a certain way of interpreting that intuition and of transforming it into an
approach to the question what necessity is. After that, I begin the quest for an
account of necessity anew, this time starting from the modalist intuition. I argue
that this intuition, too, can be transformed by natural steps into an account of
necessity. As it turns out, both maneuvers lead us to the same theory of necessity.
I take this to support my contention that this view can be regarded as capturing
both the otherworldliness and the modalist intuition.
Consider first the otherworldliness intuition, i.e. the intuition that necessary
propositions are those that are true in all scenarios that are alternatives to the way
things actually are. This intuition suggests that the ordinary-life practice that gives
rise to the concept of necessity is one in which we consider situations that we do
not believe to obtain, and ask ourselves what is true in them. There is more than
one common cognitive procedure that fits this description. In section 2, I argue
that the one in which modal concepts originate is our routine of representing to
ourselves certain scenarios and considering what would have been true if they had
obtained. We commonly express the outcome of such a thought experiment by a
counterfactual conditional. The core idea of my theory is that, roughly speaking,
for a proposition to be necessary is for it to play a certain distinctive role in the
truth-conditions of counterfactuals.
This view reverses the customary order of explanation. For the standard
view of counterfactuals, as propounded by Stalnaker and Lewis,5 analyzes them
in terms of the modal notion of a (metaphysically) possible world: if it had been
the case that p, then it would have been the case that q is (to simplify a bit) true
just in case q is true in all those possible worlds in which p is true and which are
otherwise as similar (close) to the actual world as is compatible with the truth
of p. I argue against this view in section 2.2. My discussion centers on a wellknown problem for the standard view: if the antecedent of a counterfactual is
metaphysically impossible, then there are no possible antecedent-worlds, so that
the standard account entails that the counterfactual is vacuously true. But it seems
very implausible to me that all counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible
antecedents are true. (It is metaphysically impossible for water to be an element,
but it does not seem true to say that if water were an element, everything would be
the case.) I adopt one of the obvious candidate solutions to this problem (which
has been developed in more detail by Daniel Nolan6 ): I reformulate the standard
account by simply replacing the concept of a possible world with the wider,
non-modal notion of a world. Worlds, which I think of as abstract entities of
some sort (possibly sets of propositions), comprise both possible and impossible
worlds. Impossible worlds are ordered by their closeness to the actual world, just
as possible worlds are. A counterfactual is true just in case the consequent is true
in the closest (possible or impossible) antecedent-worlds. The resulting theory of
counterfactuals does not use the concept of a possible world, and therefore leaves
us free to use counterfactuals to analyze necessity.
Such an analysis gains support from the observation that it seems natural to
paraphrase
P could not have failed to be true,
as
P would have been true no matter what (else had been the case),
or, equivalently, as: P is true and, for any situation whatsoever, if that situation
had obtained, P would still have been true. In section 2, I argue that, by qualifying
and refining this idea, we can develop an account of necessity. I also show that the
central idea of this account can be reformulated in terms of the familiar closeness
(similarity) account of counterfactuals: for a proposition to be necessary is for
it to be true in all worlds that have at least a certain degree of closeness to the
actual world.
Consider next the modalist intuition that the necessary truths are those
propositions whose truth is particularly secure or inexorable. This intuition
appears to rest on the idea that there is a dimension of inexorability on which
we can locate different truths. The necessary truths are those truths whose value
on that dimension is above a certain point. In section 3, I will argue that it is
this dimension of security or inexorability that we are talking about when we
242 / Boris Kment
ask ourselves, concerning some fact about our world, how easily it could have
failed to obtain. To say that a certain proposition has a high degree of security or
inexorability is simply to say that it could not easily have failed to be true. On the
account I will propound, how easily a state of affairs could have obtained depends
on the range of counterfactual situations in which it does obtain. If it obtains in
situations that depart only minimally from the actual world, then we are inclined
to say that it could easily have obtained. (Suppose that your favorite soccer team
would have won their last game if the goalkeeper had stood just an inch further to
the right in the fiftieth minute of the game. This gives you reasons for saying that
your team could easily have won.) If a state of affairs obtains only in situations
that depart very much from actuality, then we will instead say that it could not
easily have obtained. How easily a state of affairs could have obtained is thus
determined by the degree of closeness between the actual world and the closest
world in which the state of affairs does obtain. The degree of inexorability of a
true proposition is accordingly measured by the distance from the actual world
to the closest worlds in which the proposition is false. If we combine this with the
thought that metaphysical necessity is simply a high degree of inexorability, we
arrive, once again, at the conclusion that for a proposition to be metaphysically
necessary is for it to be true in every world that has at least a certain degree of
closeness to the actual world.
In section 3.3 I argue that this approach to metaphysical necessity can be
generalized to other kinds of necessity, such as nomic and conceptual necessity. I
think that these other kinds of necessity mark off degrees on the same dimension
of inexorability as metaphysical necessity, although they mark off different
degrees. The degree of inexorability that a proposition needs to have in order
to be conceptually necessary is higher, that which it needs to have in order to
be nomically necessary is lower, than that which is required for metaphysical
necessity. In section 4, I use these ideas to formulate formal definitions of
conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity.
My discussion of the modalist intuition yields the result that modal
propertiesnecessity and possibilitycome in degrees. I argue that, when we
talk about how easily a certain state of affairs could have obtained, we are talking
about its degree of possibility. The relation of comparative closeness of worlds,
too, can be interpreted as a relation of comparative possibility: to say that a
certain world is close to the actual world is to say that it could easily have been
actualized, i.e. that it has a high degree of possibility.7 The closeness relation is
therefore itself a modal relation. The definition of necessity in terms of closeness
that I give in section 4 reduces one modal concept to another. In order to reduce
the modal to the non-modal, it is still necessary to give a non-modal account
of the closeness relation. I tackle this task in section 6.
I find it plausible that modal facts must be grounded in non-modal facts. If
a proposition is necessary, then this modal status must ultimately be grounded
in its non-modal properties. We can sharpen this idea by drawing on the
modalist intuition that to be necessary is to be true in an especially secure
way. This intuition is naturally accompanied by another: if a certain proposition

is impossible, then this is so because that there is some kind of particularly
formidable obstacle that prevents it from being true. What secures the truth of
a necessary proposition is the fact that its negation runs up against especially
inexorable obstacles, against particularly deep features of the world order. This
makes it natural to say that the non-modal feature of a necessary truth that
grounds its special modal status is that it is underwritten by certain very deep
features of the world order (e.g. by the metaphysical or mathematical order of
the world). In sections 4 and 5, I try to explain these ideas in less metaphorical
terms and, drawing on the account of counterfactuals that I expounded in my
(2006), I argue that my theory can capture them.
In section 7, I attempt to show that, by directing our attention to the cognitive
practice in which the concept of metaphysical necessity originates, the account
of this paper permits us to see why this concept is useful to us: it facilitates
counterfactual reasoning, by allowing us to single out those propositions that
play a certain special role in that practice.
A deeper account of the utility of modal concepts would also require us to
say what the use of counterfactual reasoning itself is. The answer is, I think, that
counterfactual reasoning is a component of a reasoning strategy that is useful for
a variety of purposes, such as predicting the likely outcomes of possible future
actions, and evaluating claims about the causal and explanatory interrelations
between different facts. Unfortunately, I cannot expound that part of my view in
this paper. That is a task for another occasion.
The core idea of the account I will propound has been foreshadowed (though
not developed) by Davis Lewis in the 1970s in his book on counterfactuals, and
in a posthumously published paper by Ian McFetridge.8 In the last couple of
years, Marc Lange, Timothy Williamson, Christopher Hill, and I have worked
out similar ideas independently of each other.9 In this paper, I intend to make
further progress on motivating and developing the approach.
1.3. Resources
As a preliminary to carrying out the project I have outlined, I will give a
brief overview of the concepts and presuppositions on which my account rests.
Firstly, I will use the concepts of a things essence or nature, and of its
essential properties. The essence or nature of an object is what it is to be that
object. The essence of propane, e.g., is to be C 3 H 8 , since to be propane just
is to be C 3 H 8 . The essential properties of an entity are those that are part of
what it is to be that entity, i.e. those that make it the entity it is. It is, e.g., an
essential feature of propane that it is a compound of hydrogen and carbon; being
composed of these elements is part of what it is to be propane. By contrast, it is
merely accidental to propane that it is used for cooking.
It has long been common to define the notions of essence and of an essential
property in modal terms.10 (On this account, a property of a thing is essential to
244 / Boris Kment
it just in case the thing cannot exist and fail to have the property. The essence of
an object is a property that it cannot fail to have (if it exists) and that no other
thing could have had.) But recently Kit Fine11 argued that this characterization of
essence cannot adequately capture the underlying intuitive idea. As Fine points
out, it is a necessary feature of the number 2 to be a member of the set {2}, and
a necessary property of {2} to have 2 as a member. But while having 2 as an
element is part of what it is to be {2}, being a member of {2} is not part of what
it is to be 2. If Fine is right, as I think that he is, then there is no apparent reason
for thinking that the concepts of essence and essentiality need to be explained in
modal terms. The two notions can therefore be used in an account of necessity
without obvious threat of circularity. That is what I will do.
The way in which I conceive of my project is intimately bound up with
the concept of essence. I take the otherworldliness and modalist intuitions to
be intuitions about the essence of necessity. They amount, respectively, to the
intuition that truth in all alternatives to the way things are is the essence of
necessity, and that inexorability is the essence of necessity. And I understand my
present task as that of specifying the essence of metaphysical necessity, i.e. of
giving what is sometimes called a real definition of the property of metaphysical
necessity.
Secondly, I will avail myself of a conception of propositions as entities with
syntactic (sentence-like) structure. This conception allows us to understand the
notion of (narrowly) logical truth for propositions in a very intuitive way: a
logical truth is a proposition that is true in virtue of its logical structure alone.
This concept of logical truth seems to me to be non-modal, and the standard
(model-theoretic) way of spelling out its details makes no use of any modal
locutions.12
Thirdly, I will use the notion of a conceptual or analytic truth. I think that
this concept, too, can be understood non-modally: a proposition is an analytic
or conceptual truth just in case it is true in virtue of the fact that it is built
up from certain concepts in a certain way, and in virtue of the natures of these
concepts.
Given that the notions of conceptual and narrowly logical truth (and
the concomitant concepts of logical consequence, logical consistency, and so
forth) are non-modal, they can be used in an account of necessity without
circularity.
We can use the notions of narrowly logical consistency and conceptual
truth to define the concepts of analytic consistency and analytic consequence: a
proposition is analytically consistent just in case it is narrowly logically consistent
with the set of all conceptual truths. P is an analytic consequence of a set S of
propositions just in case P is a narrowly logical consequence of the union of S with
the set of all conceptual truths. The concepts of analytic consistency and analytic
consequence are non-modal. I will make extensive use of them throughout this
paper.
2. The Otherworldliness Intuition

The attempt to develop an account of necessity on the basis of the otherworldliness intuition is beset with difficulty. Consider the biconditional
(1) A proposition is necessary if and only if it is true, not only as things
actually are, but in all possible situations.
(1) as it stands does not look like a promising starting point for an informative
theory of modality. The notion of a possible situation seems prima facie to be a
modal concept, and (1), far from being an informative account of what necessity
is, merely seems to articulate a fairly trivial interconnection between two modal
concepts.
One way out of this difficulty is Lewiss: Regard possible situations, or
at least possible worlds (maximal 13 possible situations), as things just like the
actual world, understood as the mereological sum of everything spatio-temporally
connected to you and me. A possible world is simply (to simplify somewhat) a
big spatio-temporal object.14 On this view, the notion of a possible world can be
explained in non-modal terms, and necessity can therefore be defined in terms of
possible worlds without circularity. Most people, myself included, are not willing
to accept the ontological commitments of this position. If we set aside Lewiss
view of possible worlds, we are left with what is usually called an ersatzist
conception. Ersatzists identify possible situations with entities of some more
palatable sort than Lewiss worlds, such as sets of propositions. Of course, not
every set of propositions can count as a possible situation. In defining the notion
of a possible situation, the ersatzist therefore needs to formulate some criterion
for distinguishing those sets of propositions that are possible situations from
those that are not. But the obvious candidate criteria (e.g., consistency with all
necessary truths) are modal ones. And if we use one of these criteria, we remain
trapped in the narrow and uninformative circle of modal concepts. Suppose, for
the purpose of illustration, that the ersatzist defines a possible world as a set of
propositions that is maximal (i.e., which, for every proposition P, contain either
P or P) and narrowly logically consistent with all necessary truths. Assume
further that he says that a proposition is true in a possible world just in case it is
an element of this world, and that he interprets (1) as the claim that a proposition
is necessary just in case it is true in all possible worlds. On this account, all that (1)
tells us is that the necessary truths are related in a certain way to themselves: the
necessary truths are just those propositions that are elements of all the maximal
sets of propositions that are consistent with all necessary truths. But it is true of
every deductively closed set S of truths that it contains all and only the truths
that are elements of all maximal sets of propositions that are consistent with all
members of S. Hence, someone who does not yet know anything about necessity
will, by reading (1), learn know no more about necessity than that the class of
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necessary propositions is a deductively closed set of truths. There is therefore a

sense in which (1) is almost completely uninformative as an attempt to explain
what necessity is. But this conflicts with the intuition that we started from, namely
the idea that truth in all possible situations is simply what necessity is, so that (1)
encapsulates the essence of necessity.
Is there a way of understanding (1) that permits us to break out of the narrow
circle of modal concepts and to develop an informative account of necessity on
the basis of (1)? I will present what appears to me to be a suitable construal of
(1) and sketch a strategy for formulating an account of necessity on the basis of
it.
2.1. The Counterfactual Concept of Truth in a Situation

I suggested in section 1.1 that the notion of metaphysical necessity arises from
certain ordinary-life practices of thinking and talking. Since our starting point
is the thought that the necessity of a proposition consists in its truth, not only in
the world as it actually is, but in every possible situation, we might suspect that
the ordinary-life practice that gives rise to the concept of necessity is one in which
we consider situations that we believe not to obtain, and ask ourselves what is true
in them.15 We can readily distinguish between two common cognitive procedures
of this kind. In the one we consider the situation as actual, i.e. we consider it in
order to determine what is true if the situation actually obtains. In the other, we
consider it as counterfactual, i.e. with the intention of finding out what would have
been true if the situation had obtained. Both of these familiar practices are often
conducted by what is called hypothetical reasoning: we hypothetically entertain
the thought that a certain situation obtains, and reason from this hypothesis and
certain background knowledge to other propositions.
Consider two examples:
Bob: I hope that Fred didnt get to read Susies letter to Bugsy.
Mary: If he did, he got over it very quickly. For I saw him earlier and he
was jesting merrily.
Bob: Im glad that Fred didnt get to read Susies letter to Bugsy. Just
imagine how he would have reacted!
Mary: He would have been writhing in agony!
In the first case, Mary considers the situation as actual, in the second case, as
counterfactual. As the two examples indicate, we have special linguistic tools for
expressing the outcomes of these cognitive processes: the conditional connectives.
The antecedent describes the situation being supposed, and the consequent is the
proposition that we believe to be true in that situation. If we consider a situation
as actual and conclude that a certain proposition is true in it, we report this by
using the indicative conditional. When considering the situation as counterfactual,

we use the subjunctive conditional. Philosophical research on the two kinds of
cognitive procedure has often been conducted under the heading the semantics
of conditionals.
How do these reflections help us in interpreting (1)? Let us center on the two
crucial terms on the right-hand side of the biconditional: possible situation and
true in. Some interpretations of (1) restrict the extension of possible situation
to possible worlds, i.e. to maximal possible situations (i.e., possible situations in
which every proposition is either true or false). The foregoing considerations,
however, seem to show that there are ordinary-life practices of considering
what is true in non-actual situations in which our interest is not restricted to
situations of the maximal sort. I therefore suggest that we explore a broader
construal of situation, on which its extension includes all situations, maximal
and non-maximal. On this interpretation, we can think of possible situations as
sets of mutually compossible propositions; or (replacing sets of propositions by
the conjunctions of their members) we can identify them simply with possible
propositions.
Next, what about the notion of truth in a situation? If we construe true in
in (1) as expressing the concept of truth-in-the-situation-considered-as-actual, we
obtain the following version of (1):
A proposition Q is necessary if and only if Q is true and, for every possible
proposition P, if P is actually true, then Q is true.
But this version of (1) is false: consider the possible proposition that the yellow
stuff that fills our cavities, that the rich use to decorate their ears and fingers, etc.,
is not a metal. We would say that, if this situation actually obtains, then gold
is not a metal. Considered as actual, this situation is therefore not one in which
gold is a metal. Hence, although the proposition that gold is a metal is necessary,
it is not true in every possible situation considered as actual. This seems to show
that, if we are to choose one of the aforementioned two ordinary-life notions of
truth-in-a-situation in interpreting (1), it ought to be that of truth-in-a-situationconsidered-as-counterfactual.
Suppose, then, that we allow the extension of possible situation in (1)
to include non-maximal situations and that we understand true in in (1) in
counterfactual terms. This yields the following version of (1): a proposition Q is
necessary if and only if Q is true and, for every possible situation S, Q would
still have been true if S had obtained. If we simply identify possible situations
with possible propositions in the way suggested above, we can interpret (1) as
amounting to the following principle:
(2) A proposition Q is necessary if and only if Q is true and, for every
possible proposition P, Q would still have been true if P had been
true.
248 / Boris Kment
This interpretation of (1) is supported, I think, by the fact that there is

strong independent evidence for the claim that we are intuitively inclined to
accept something like (2) as an explanation of what necessity is. For, when asked
what it is for a proposition Q to be necessary, it is surely natural to say something
like this:
(3) To say that Q could not have failed to be true is to say that Q not only
is true, but that it would have been true no matter what (else had been
the case);
which seems to mean this: a proposition Q is necessary just in case Q is true
and, for every proposition P, if P had been true, Q would still have been
true.
But how are we to interpret the quantifier in for every proposition P? Is it
an unrestricted quantifier that ranges over all propositions whatsoever, or is there
some restriction on its range (as there is on most quantifiers we use in ordinary
discourse)? I think that there are very strong reasons for thinking that we do
not pre-theoretically take every counterfactual with necessary consequent to be
true. In particular, I find it fairly clear that we do not accept all counterfactuals
with necessary consequents and impossible antecedents. For instance, Thatcher
is not my mother, and I think that it is necessary that she is not. But I do
not think that it is true to say that, if Thatcher were my mother, she would
(still) not be my mother. There is therefore presumably some restriction on the
quantifier over propositions that is implicit in (3), and the most obvious candidate
is a restriction to possible propositions. This suggests that we read (3) as saying
that
(2) A proposition Q is necessary if and only if Q is true and, for every possible
proposition P, Q would still have been true if P had been true.
On this reading, (3) simply amounts to (2).
2.2. The Analysis of Counterfactuals and the Concept of a Possible World

So far, it will no doubt seem that the special interpretation that I have
put on (1) does nothing to make (1) look like a promising starting point for
an informative account of modality. There is still the modal term possible
proposition on the right-hand side of (2). And my counterfactual interpretation
of truth-in-a-situation might appear only to make matters worse. For, on the
standard account, counterfactuals are to be analyzed in terms of the notion of a
possible world. If they are, then on my reading of (1), the right-hand side contains
(implicitly and explicitly respectively) both the notion of a possible world and
the concept of a possible proposition.
Let me consider these worries one by one. I will first turn to the question
whether counterfactuals are to be analyzed in terms of the notion of a possible
world. The problematic occurrence of the term possible proposition on the
right-hand side of (2) will be the subject of the next section.
The basic idea underlying the standard account of counterfactuals has been
nicely stated by David Lewis in the opening sentence of his book on the matter:
If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over seems to me to mean something
like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and
which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails
permits it to, the kangaroos topple over.16
More formally, the counterfactual connective (for which I will use the symbol
!) is defined along the following lines:
(4) P ! Q is true just in case Q is true in all the closest (i.e. most similar)
metaphysically possible P-worlds.17
The possible-worlds account faces a well-known problem: If P is a metaphysically impossible proposition, then there are no possible worlds in which P
is true. In that case, it is vacuously true that Q holds in all the closest possible
P-worlds. The possible-worlds account therefore entails that, for any metaphysically impossible proposition P, all counterfactuals P ! Q are true. But we
have already seen in section 1.2 and in the last section that this is counterintuitive.
One strategy for avoiding this problem is to formulate the closeness account,
not in terms of the concept of a possible world, but in terms of the wider
(and non-modal) notion of a world, which covers impossible worldsworlds
in which impossible propositions are trueas well as possible worlds. Daniel
Nolan, among others, has argued in detail for this solution to the problem.18
The basic idea is simple: all worlds, not just the possible ones, are ordered with
respect to their closeness to the actual world. We can restate the closeness account
as follows:
(5) P ! Q is true just in case Q is true in all the closest P-worlds.
(5) is just like (4), except that the modal notion of a possible world has been
replaced by the wider concept of a world. For any impossible proposition P,
there are impossible worlds in which P is true. P ! Q is true if Q is true in
all the closest impossible P-worlds; it is false otherwise.
I believe that the foregoing considerations show that there are reasons quite
independent of the present project for replacing the standard account (4) by (5),
which makes no use of the notion of a possible world.
250 / Boris Kment
(5) presupposes that there are impossible worlds. That is problematic on a

Lewisian realist conception of worlds, but unproblematic for an ersatzist who
regards worlds as abstract entities, such as sets of propositions that meet certain
conditions. Such an ersatzist can think of impossible worlds simply as sets of
propositions that meet these conditions and which contain some impossible
propositions. I suggest that we adopt this way of thinking of worlds for the
purposes of this paper.19 (I will say a little more about the ersatzist conception
of worlds in section 3.3.)
The concept of truth-in-a-world that is used in (5) is distinct from the two
notions of truth-in-a-situation that I distinguished in section 2.1 (viz. the concepts
of truth-in-a-situation-considered-as-actual and truth-in-a-situation-consideredas-counterfactual). If we are thinking of worlds as sets of propositions, then we
can say that a proposition is true in a world in the sense relevant to (5) just in
case it is a member of the world.
2.3. Ramsifying out of the Circle

Even if counterfactuals are not to be analyzed in terms of the notion of a
possible world, the right-hand side of (2) still contains the modal term possible
proposition. We are therefore trapped in the narrow and uninformative circle of
modal concepts as long as we center our attention on the property specified on
one side of the biconditional in order to give an account of the modal property
mentioned on the other side. I suggest that we instead focus on the property that
is ascribed to the necessary truths by the biconditional as a whole, thereby in
effect using (2) as (a partial) implicit definition of the concept of necessity. Let
me explain what I mean by this.
A proposition is metaphysically possible just in case it is analytically
consistent with the set of all and only the metaphysical necessities. We can
use this principle to reformulate (2) as a statement, not about individual necessary propositions, but about the set containing all and only the necessary
propositions:
A proposition Q is a member of the set of all and only the metaphysical
necessities if and only if Q is true and, for every proposition P that
is analytically consistent with the set of all and only the metaphysical
necessities, Q would still have been true if P had been true.
If we uniformly replace both occurrences of expressions for the set of metaphysical necessities by instances of a variable, we obtain the following open
sentence:
(2 ) A proposition Q is a member of x if and only if Q is true and, for every

proposition P that is analytically consistent with x, Q would still have
been true if P had been true.
(2 ) does not contain the notion of a possible situation or of a possible
proposition. I will therefore try to break out of the narrow circle of modal
notions by giving an account of necessity in terms of the property expressed by
(2 ).20
Let us call a world w analytically consistent with a set of propositions P
just in case the propositions that are true in w are jointly analytically consistent
with P. And let us call a set S of worlds a sphere around world w just in case
every world in S is closer to w than any world not in S. Given certain plausible
assumptions it can be proven that
(6) A deductively closed set S of true propositions has the property expressed by (2 ) just in case the worlds that are analytically consistent
with S form a sphere around the actual world.
The term the actual world in (6) is to be understood in a non-rigid way, as
synonymous with whatever world is actualized. When (6) is evaluated with
respect to another possible world w, the term the actual world denotes w. It
can be shown that, when so interpreted, (6) is metaphysically necessary: it is true
in any metaphysically possible world w that a deductively closed set S of true
propositions has the property expressed by (2 ) if and only if the worlds that are
analytically consistent with S form a sphere around w (For the proof, see the
appendix.)
To say that the set of necessary truths has the property expressed by (2 ) is
thus provably equivalent to saying that the worlds that are analytically consistent
with the necessary truthsthe possible worldsare closer than all the other
worlds. In other words, the possible worlds are all and only those worlds that
are no more than a certain distance away from the actual world. A proposition
is necessary just in case it holds in all worlds that are no more than a certain
distance away. On the present interpretation of (1), this is essentially what (1)
tells us. But we started from the idea that (1) tells us what it is for a proposition
to be necessary. We therefore naturally arrive at the idea that for a proposition
to be necessary is for it to be true in every world that is no more than a certain
distance away from the actual world.
Needless to say, this is not as yet a full account of necessity. It is merely a
rough idea that can form the starting point for developing a theory of necessity.
I will try to develop such an account in section 4. But before that, I will try
to provide further motivation for going down this road. I have so far tried to
motivate the idea as one way of explaining the otherworldliness intuition. I think
that the same idea can also be presented as a way of developing the modalist
intuition. This will be the task of section 3.
252 / Boris Kment
2.4. The Context-Dependence of Counterfactuals and the

Standard Interpretation
The truth-conditions of counterfactuals are widely held to vary across
contexts of use. To borrow an example from Jackson,21 suppose Frank lives
on the tenth floor of a building, and that there is nothing that could break the
fall of someone jumping out of his window onto the street below. We can safely
say that Frank would get hurt if he were to jump. But assume that Frank says:
Im a sensible chap. I would never jump from a tenth-floor window, unless I had
made sure that there was a safety net. So, if I were to jump, a net would be in
place, and I would be fine. Franks reasoning might convince us of the truth of
his counterfactual. It seems that the context has shifted. In the context as it was
before Franks utterance, worlds in which Frank jumps despite the absence of a
net count as closer than worlds in which he first places a net below the window
and then jumps. After Franks utterance, it is the other way around.
Such considerations convinced me that the truth-conditions of counterfactuals are context-dependent. However, like David Lewis, I believe that there is such a
thing as a default or standard assignment of truth-conditions to counterfactuals,
an assignment we choose when interpreting the utterance of a counterfactual
unless our presumption in favor of it is cancelled by distinctive features of the
context.22 This seems plausible enough in the example of the last paragraph: If
presented with the case out of the blue, we would say that Frank would get hurt
if he were to jump. It requires some stage-setting (like that provided by Franks
utterance) to create a context in which we are willing to say that he would be
fine.
(2 ) can express different properties, depending on which reading we give to
the counterfactual in (2 ). I do not claim that the set of metaphysical necessities
has each of the properties that can be expressed by (2 ) on some reading of the
counterfactual. (That would be a bold claim, given the wide variation in the
truth-conditions of counterfactuals across contexts.) Instead, I stipulate that
the counterfactual in (2 ) is to be given the standard interpretation. I maintain
that the set of metaphysical necessities has the property that (2 ) expresses when it
is so interpreted, and this is the claim on which I will build my theory of necessity.
I do not claim that the set has the properties that are expressed by (2 ) on other
readings of the counterfactual.
3. The Modalist Intuition

3.1. The Inexorability Scale
The modalist intuition is the thought that necessity is a special way of being
true. The necessary truths are those propositions whose truth is secure and
inexorable in a way in which the truth of contingent propositions is not. This

implies that there is some dimension of inexorability on which different truths
occupy different positions, and that to be metaphysically necessary is simply to
have a value above a specific point on that scale.
contingent (could
have been otherwise)
necessary (could not

have been otherwise)

inexorability scale
I suggested in section 1.1 that the notion of metaphysical necessity arises

from certain ordinary-life practices of thinking and talking. We should therefore
expect the inexorability dimension to be one that figures in such everyday
practices. It would help in developing the modalist intuition if we could find
out which practices these are. One approach to this task is to ask whether
there are ordinary-language expressions other than the plain could (and the
concomitant expressions must, necessary, possible, etc.) that express degrees
on the inexorability scale. Now, usually we talk about the values of different
objects on a single scale by using expressions to which intensifiers (very,
exceedingly, etc.) can be attached and which allow for the formation of comparatives (more . . . than, less . . . than). When talking about the heights of different
people, e.g., we use expressions (such as tall, and short) that allow for both
kinds of transformation. We may therefore wonder whether there are English
expressions that are just like could, except that they allow for the addition of
intensifiers and the formation of comparatives.
Now, we cannot simply add intensifiers to, or form comparatives of, could
have been the case. We cannot say, this very could have been the case, or this
could more have been the case than that. But we can obtain an expression
that allows for the addition of intensifiers and the formation of comparatives by
adding an adverbial modifier to could have been the case:
could easily have been the case.
We can say that such-and-such could very easily have been the case, or all too
easily, or not very easily. And we can say that x could more easily have been the
case than y.
But how are we to analyze the claim that a certain state of affairs could
or could not easily have been the case? One approach to this question is to
consider how we ordinarily evaluate the claim that a certain non-actual state of
affairs could or could not easily have obtained. The usual way of doing so is to
consider the range of counterfactual circumstances in which the state of affairs
does obtain. We may say, e.g.,
254 / Boris Kment
(7) They could so easily have won the game. If the goalkeeper had stood
just an inch closer to the goalpost, the other team would not have scored
their second goal.
In general, if the state of affairs obtains in some worlds that depart only minimally
from the actual situation (as in the case of (7)), then we want to say that it could
easily have obtained. If it obtains only in worlds that depart very much from
actuality, then we say that it could not easily have obtained:
A: They could easily have won the game.
B: I dont think so. I think that they would have won only if Fred and Susie
had signed up for the team, Martha hadnt had a sore foot, Bugsy had
been sober, the weather had been nice, . . . .
This suggests that how easily a proposition P could have been true is a matter
of how much the worlds in which P is true depart from actuality. The closer the
closest P-worlds are, the more easily P could have been true.23
It seems plausible to me that could easily have been the case is only
one among a whole range of ordinary-language expressions that can be used
to express degrees on this dimension. Other expressions of this kind arguably
include:
It almost happened.
It was within a hairs breadth.
This was a close call.
This was a narrow escape.24
And so forth. For example:
He was almost killed. If he had stood five inches further to the right, the
brick would have smashed his head.
There is a counterfactual situation that departs only minimally from ours, such
that he would have been killed if that situation had obtained. This supports the
claim that he was almost killed.
I suggest that could have been otherwise and could not have been otherwise
express degrees on the very same dimension that we are talking about when we
ask how easily things could have been otherwise. This idea seems very plausible.
Consider:
Freds house could easily have been destroyed by yesterdays earthquake. (If
the earthquake had been just a little bit stronger, the house would have been
destroyed.)
Susies house could not as easily have been destroyed. (The earthquake would
have had to be much stronger to destroy Susies house.)
Bugsys house could not possibly have been destroyed. (Earthquakes of
sufficient strength never occur in this area.)
This sequence of sentences feels intuitively like a progression along a single
dimension.
This suggests that, when we are speaking about a propositions degree of
inexorability, we are talking about how easily it could have been false. To say
that it has a high degree of inexorability is to say that it could not easily have
been false, i.e. that the closest worlds where it is false are far away from the
actual world. In the example of the last paragraph, e.g., the fact that Freds
house survived the earthquake has a low degree of inexorability, the fact that
Susies house survived has a somewhat higher degree, the fact that Bugsys house
survived has the highest degree of the three facts.
Which degree on the inexorability scale is expressed by could not have been
otherwise depends on the context. In philosophical discussions, the phrase often
expresses metaphysical necessity. In ordinary life, it often expresses a lower degree
of inexorability. (Seeing that Susie was head and shoulders above the competition,
I can truly say that she could not have failed to win the tournament. This does not
mean that her victory was metaphysically necessary.) It is an interesting question
how it is determined which degree of inexorability is expressed by the phrase in
any given context.
The key to the answer may lie in a conspicuous feature of our use of could:
When we say that neither A nor B could possibly have failed to be true, we
cannot add, in the same breath, that A could more easily have failed to be true
than B. We cannot say, Neither Smith nor Jones could possibly have won the
tournament, and Smith could have done so more easily than Jones. By saying
that A and B could not have failed to be true, we take them out of the range of
propositions for which we can raise the question of how easily they could have
failed to be true. In a different context, it may be true to say that A and B could
have failed to be true, and in that context, it makes perfect sense to say that A
could more easily have failed to be true than B. For instance, when we move into
a context in which could expresses metaphysical possibility, it becomes true to
say that both Smith and Jones could have won the tournament. And if Smith is
much better than Jones, then we can say in this new context that Smith could
more easily have won than Jones.
The following analogy illuminates my attempt to make sense of these data.
Suppose that I want to buy a car. I am interested in the differences between the
prices of different models. But only within certain limits. I do not much care how
the price of a Rolls Royce compares to that of a Mercedes, since I know that I
cannot afford either car. There is a certain maximum amount of money I can
spend, and differences between prices that are higher than that are of no interest
256 / Boris Kment
to me. That is how it often is when we are comparing the values of different
objects along a certain dimension, and I claim that it is also how it is when
we are comparing the values of different truths on the inexorability scale. For
the purposes at hand, we may be interested in the differences between degrees
of inexorability below a certain point on the scale, but we may not care about
the differences between the different values that are above that point. I would
like to suggest that could not have been otherwise marks what we may call the
indifference point on the inexorability scale, i.e. that point on the scale above
which we do not wish to distinguish degrees of inexorability in the given context:
when it is true to say, in a given context, that neither A nor B could possibly
have been the case, then we cannot, in the same context, ask which of A and B
could more easily have been the case. The location of the indifference point on
the inexorability scale can vary from context to context.
I suggest that the use of could not have been otherwise to express metaphysical necessity is simply a special case of this. The contexts in which the
phrase expresses the notion of metaphysical necessity are simply those in which
the indifference point has a specific (very high) value on the inexorability scale.25
On this view, for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be true
in every world that is at most a certain distance away from the actual world. This
is just the idea that we arrived at in section 2, as a result of trying to develop
the otherworldliness intuition. We have thus gained independent support for the
view via two different routes.
3.2. Modal Properties Come in Degrees

According to the previous section, for a state of affairs to be metaphysically
possible is simply for it to occupy a certain position on a continuous dimension,
the dimension that measures how easily different states of affairs could have
obtained. Now, could easily have been true is an overtly modal idiom; it is more
or less just like could, except that it allows for the addition of intensifiers and
the formation of comparatives. It is therefore natural to speak of the dimension
as measuring a propositions degree of possibility. Corresponding to the degrees
of possibility, there are degrees of necessity. The lower the degree of possibility
of P, the higher Ps degree of necessity. (A propositions degree of necessity is
just its degree of inexorability.) We thus arrive at the view that modal properties
of propositions come in degrees. (The idea that possibility of propositions is
a matter of degree, and that degrees of possibility can be defined in terms of
closeness in the way described, was suggested, but not motivated or developed,
by David Lewis in his book on counterfactuals26 .)
I argued in the last section that how easily a state of affairs could have
obtained is measured by the closeness of the closest worlds where it obtains.
When we apply this principle to maximal states of affairs or worlds, we obtain
the result that a world ws degree of possibility equals the degree of closeness of
the closest world where w obtains. Since the closest world in which w obtains is
w itself, this amounts to saying that a worlds degree of possibility is simply its
degree of closeness. The relation of comparative closeness can thus naturally be
thought of as a relation of comparative possibility of worlds. To ask how close
a world is to the actual world is to ask how easily the world could have been
actualized, what degree of possibility it possesses.
In the last section, I analyzed inexorability in terms of closeness. This account
amounts to a definition of comparative necessity for propositions in terms of
comparative possibility for worlds. It reduces one modal notion to a more basic
modal concept. In order to reduce the modal to the non-modal, we still need
to give a non-modal account of the closeness relation. This will be the task of
section 6. Drawing on the results of the previous sections and on those of my
(2006), I will define closeness in terms of concepts which, in my opinion, are not
themselves to be analyzed in modal terms, such as the concepts of explanation
and of a law of nature.
The picture I sketched is summarized in the table below (an arrow means is
definable in terms of ):
Comparative necessity (aka comparative inexorability) of
propositions
Modal concepts
Comparative possibility (aka comparative closeness) of worlds
Non-modal
concepts
Explanation, laws of nature, etc.
In the next section, I will attempt to provide further evidence for the claim that
necessity comes in degrees, by arguing that this view allows us to give a unified
account of different kinds of necessity.
3.3. Conceptual and Nomic Necessity

The concept of metaphysical necessity is only one of several notions of necessity that are of interest to philosophers. The most prominent other examples are
the notions of conceptual and nomic (natural, nomological, physical) necessity.
Like McFetridge and Lange,27 I find it plausible that there should be something
that metaphysical necessity and these other kinds of necessity have in common
(and which is not possessed by any other properties), some common feature in
virtue of which they are kinds of necessity. That is, we should expect there to
be some property that is the defining feature of the higher-order property of
being a kind of necessity, and which is therefore possessed by all and only the
258 / Boris Kment
properties that are kinds of necessity. Moreover, it seems plausible that it is an

essential property of metaphysical necessity that it is a kind of necessity. Hence,
whatever the defining feature might be of the higher-order property of being a
kind of necessity, the fact that metaphysical necessity has this feature should be
reflected in a correct specification of its essence. We should therefore expect a
good account of the essence of metaphysical necessity to give us some idea of
what this feature might be. I will argue that my account meets this condition.
The modalist intuition helps us to determine the common feature of the different kinds of necessity that makes them species of a common genus. According
to the modalist intuition, for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for
it to be true in an especially secure or inexorable way. This thought is intimately
connected to the idea that, if a certain proposition is metaphysically impossible,
then this is so because that there is some particularly formidable obstacle that
prevents the proposition from being true. The truth of a necessary proposition
is thus secured by the fact that its negation runs up against especially inexorable obstaclesperhaps that it runs up against the very metaphysical order of
things.
Now, I believe that the modalist intuition also applies to nomic and conceptual necessity. Consider nomic necessity first, a kind of modal status associated in
some way with the laws of nature (as well as with the metaphysical necessities).28
It seems plausible to say that the nomic necessities are true propositions whose
truth is particularly secure and inexorable, inasmuch as it is underwritten, not
necessarily by the metaphysical order of things, but either by the metaphysical or
by the natural (nomological) order: their negations run up against the metaphysical or the natural order of the world.
The modalist intuition also generalizes to conceptual necessity, but before we
can fully appreciate this fact, we need to be sure to carefully distinguish between
the properties of conceptual necessity and conceptual truth. The two properties
are coextensive: all and only the conceptual truths are conceptually necessary. But
(taking up an idea by Kit Fine29 ) I believe that they are nonetheless distinct. The
property of conceptual necessity is a modal property; it relates to a propositions
modal force or modal status. The property of conceptual or analytic truth, by
contrast, is non-modal. It is a propositions property of being true for a certain
reason, namely its being true in virtue of the fact that it is built up from certain
concepts in a certain way, and in virtue of the natures of these concepts. Now,
something akin to the modalist intuition about metaphysical necessity seems
intuitively plausible for conceptual necessity as well: for a proposition to be
conceptually necessary is for it to be true in an especially secure or inexorable way.
Conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity are usually thought to be
ordered by their strictness, by the hardness of the must associated with them (to
borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein30 ): conceptual necessity is the strictest of the
three kinds of necessity, nomic necessity is the least strict. This suggests that the
degree of inexorability or necessity that a proposition needs to possess in order
to be conceptually necessary is higher than that which it needs to possess in order
to be metaphysically necessary, and the latter degree is, in turn, higher than that
which is required in order for a proposition to be nomically necessary.
On this view, there are points on the inexorability scale, v n , v m , v c , such that
to be nomically necessary is to have some value above v n on the inexorability
scale, to be metaphysically necessary is to have some value above v m , and to be
conceptually necessary is to have some value above the still higher point v c .
Inexorability / necessity
scale
conceptually
necessary props.
vc
vm
metaphysically
necessary props.
nomically necessary
vn
@
nomically possible worlds

metaphysically possible worlds
conceptually possible worlds
According to my account of section 3.1, a true propositions degree of

inexorability equals the distance from the actual world to the closest worlds
in which the proposition is false (or, equivalently, the radius of the largest sphere
throughout which the proposition is true). The individual degrees of inexorability
therefore correspond directly to the individual spheres around the actual world
(as represented in the foregoing diagram). According to the account of conceptual
and nomic necessity suggested above, the conceptually possible worlds must
therefore form a sphere around the actual world, and the same must be true
of the nomically possible worlds. I think that these predictions of my account
are borne out. Let me discuss the two cases one by one, starting with conceptual
necessity.
Conceptual necessity. Before we can discuss this case, some preparatory
considerations will be necessary. I argued in section 2.2 that counterpossibles,
i.e. counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents, need not be
vacuously true. I tried to support this claim by considering examples of counterpossibles and appealing to the intuition that their truth-conditions are not trivial.
Most people I asked agree with my judgment about these examples. However,
in the examples I used, the antecedents (such as Thatcher is my mother)
were never analytically false. The responses of my subjects became more varied
260 / Boris Kment
when they were presented with counterfactuals whose antecedents are analytic
falsehoods, such as If there were triangles that did not have three angles, . . . .
Such counterfactuals are quite different from the likes of If Thatcher were my
mother . . . , inasmuch as their antecedents contradict themselves. Some of my
subjects felt that this made it hard for them to understand what scenario they
were supposed to envisage and reason about hypothetically, and therefore made
it difficult for them to assign truth-values to the counterfactuals in a non-trivial
way. Other subjects saw no such difficulty. I am undecided.
I said in section 2.2 that we can permit counterfactuals with metaphysically
impossible antecedents to have non-trivial truth-conditions if we let impossible
worlds figure in the theory of counterfactuals alongside possible worlds. A
metaphysically impossible world can be analytically consistent (i.e., the propositions true at the world may be jointly narrowly logically consistent with all
conceptual truths). Whether or not we want to take the further step and allow
analytically inconsistent worlds to figure in our theory depends on whether we
want counterfactuals with analytically false antecedents to have non-trivial truthconditions. If we do not, then we will have no need for analytically inconsistent
worlds. We can then define worlds as maximal analytically consistent sets of
propositions. If we want counterfactuals with analytically false antecedents to
have non-trivial truth-conditions, then we need to make room for analytically
inconsistent worlds. We can do so by defining worlds, not as maximal analytically
consistent sets of propositions, but simply as maximal sets of propositions,
without stipulating that they need to be analytically consistent.
For our present purposes, we need not decide between the two views. We
merely need to argue that on either view, the analytically consistent worlds form
a sphere around the actual world, i.e.
(8) Analytically consistent worlds are closer to the actual world than analytically inconsistent worlds.
If there are no analytically inconsistent worlds, then (8) is vacuously true. But I
think that (8) is also true if there are analytically inconsistent worlds. In order to
understand what motivates this assumption, note that, as long as an assumption
we hypothetically entertain is analytically consistent, no analytic inconsistency
should emerge in the course of our reflection on what would have been the case
if the assumption had been true. More precisely, where A is any analytically
consistent proposition, every proposition C for which A ! C is true is
analytically consistent with A. This finding can be explained by (8), as is easy
to see: Suppose that A is an analytically consistent proposition, so that there
are analytically consistent worlds in which A is true.31 If (8) is true, then the
analytically consistent A-worlds must be the closest of all A-worlds. And since
the propositions true at these worlds must be mutually analytically consistent,
there can be no proposition C that is analytically inconsistent with A such that
A ! C. (8) seems to me to provide the best explanation for the fact that
no analytic inconsistency can emerge in hypothetical reasoning from an analytically consistent assumption, and it is strongly supported by this explanatory
power.
Since the analytically consistent worlds are all and only the conceptually
possible worlds, we can infer from (8) that the conceptually possible worlds form
a sphere around the actual world.
Nomic necessity. I characterized nomic necessity as a kind of necessity that is,
in some way, associated with the laws of nature (as well as with the metaphysical
necessities). But what exactly is the association between nomic necessity and the
laws? There is no consensus on the matter. According to some philosophers,
nomic necessity is a kind of necessity that attaches to the laws of nature, and to
all the propositions that are metaphysically necessitated by the laws. On another
view, nomic necessity also attaches to the truths about which principles are laws,
e.g. to true propositions of the form P is a law and P is not a law.32 On yet
another account, truths about which principles are laws are nomically necessary,
whereas the laws themselves are not.
My sympathies are with the third of these views. Let me explain why. Analytic
philosophers often (though by no means universally) assume that a universal
generalization cannot be a law of nature unless it is true without exception. But
it seems to me that, inasmuch as we are in the business of trying to capture the pretheoretical notion of lawhood, this assumption ought to be controversial. That
is, it does not seem obvious to me that there is anything in the folk concept of a
law that precludes the existence of exceptions to a law. (For many centuries belief
in miracles was very common as a central component of popular religious faith,
and on one natural and common way of understanding the notion of a miracle,
it involves a violation of natural law.) Moreover, I think that there are theoretical
pressures that make the view that laws can have small exceptions attractive. (I
say more about this issue in my (2006). See Lange (2000) for a considerably more
detailed discussion.) On this view, a universally quantified proposition can be a
law, even though it is not, strictly speaking, true. But a false proposition cannot
have any kind of necessity. I therefore do not subscribe to the idea that there
is any kind of necessity that attaches to all laws of nature. Instead, I think that
nomic necessity attaches to the truths about which principles are laws of nature,
as well as to all propositions that are metaphysically necessitated by the truths
about which principle are laws.
On this view, the nomically possible worlds are just those metaphysically
possible worlds that have the same laws of nature as the actual world. It is
controversial whether these worlds form a sphere around the actual world, but I
have argued in detail in my (2006) that this is true.33
The discussion of this section suggests an answer to the question of which
commonality between conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity makes them
species of a common genus: for each of the three properties, there is a point on
the inexorability scale such that for a proposition to have the property is for it
to have a degree of inexorability above that point. There are many other species
262 / Boris Kment
of the same genus. For every sphere, there is a kind of necessity that attaches to
all and only those propositions that are true in every world in that sphere. In
addition to the kinds of necessity that have familiar names, such as conceptual,
metaphysical and nomic necessity, there are innumerable other, nameless kinds
of necessity. For any world w, there is a sphere that contains all and only those
worlds that are at least as close to the actual world as w, and there is a kind of
necessity that attaches to all and only those propositions that are true in every
world in that sphere. This kind of necessity may not have a familiar name in
English, although we can describe it. We can use the phrase the negation of P
could less easily have obtained than w.
3.4. Other Modal Notions

I argued in the last section that my account of metaphysical necessity can be
generalized to conceptual and nomic necessity. Now, the concepts of conceptual,
metaphysical and nomic necessity are only three of the many modal notions we
possess, and we may naturally wonder whether my account also generalizes to
any of the others. What about the notions of
(9) Mathematical necessity
Biological necessity
Technological necessity
Practical necessity
Epistemic necessity?
I do not think that the properties listed under (9) belong to the same genus as the
properties of conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity. I do not think that
they mark degrees on the same scale of inexorability. Intuitively, it seems that
the dimension of security or inexorability on which the latter three notions mark
degrees is a dimension of metaphysical, mind-independent, objective security
or inexorability. The metaphysical necessities are especially secure, inasmuch as
their truth is secured by the metaphysical order of the world, by certain deep
features of the world order (e.g., the natures of things, or the mathematical facts)
that are objectively there, independently of the activities of any minds. Their
negations run up against obstacles of objective, mind-independent weight and
inexorability. Now, it seems that not all modal notions can plausibly be said to
ascribe degrees on such a scale of objective, metaphysical security. The notion of
practical necessity, e.g., seems to be a poor candidate. The practical necessities
might have a special kind of inexorability for us, but I do not think that there is a
high degree of objective, metaphysical security or inexorability that is distinctive
of all and only the practical necessities. Similarly for technological necessity.
Or consider the various notions of epistemic necessity. For a proposition to be
epistemically necessary is for its truth to be particularly secure in some sense; but
the security is epistemic, not ontic or metaphysical. The security of the proposition
consists in the fact that its truth is guaranteed by something we know, or that
we have an a priori guarantee that the proposition is true, or something of that
kind. There is no objective metaphysical security that is distinctive of the epistemic
necessities.
I am equally doubtful that any of the other properties listed under (9) capture
degrees of metaphysical inexorability (in the sense that having that property
consists simply in being located above a certain point on the inexorability scale).
Consider the case of biological necessity. If biological necessity captures a degree
of metaphysical inexorability, then the truth of every biological necessity must be
more secure and inexorable than that of any proposition that is not biologically
necessary. But this seems intuitively implausible. There are laws of physics and
chemistry that are not biological necessities (since they are not laws of biology),
but it seems implausible that their truth is less inexorable than that of biological
necessities. Similarly, I am not convinced that mathematical necessity captures
a degree of inexorability. It is mathematically necessary that 2 exists; it is not
mathematically necessary that Aristotle is not a musical performance (since this
is not a truth of mathematics).34 But the truth of the latter proposition does
not seem less inexorable than that of the former. (The obstacles that prevent
Aristotle from being a musical performance do not seem less weighty than those
that prevent 2 from failing to exist.)
Although the notions of biological and mathematical necessity do not mark
off degrees of inexorability, they may be definable in terms of notions that do.
Two ways of defining new modal concepts from notions of necessity deserve
attention in this context. Following Kit Fine, I will call them restriction and
relativization.35 To say that a notion N is defined from a kind of necessity
N by restriction is to say that a propositions falling under N consists in the
combination of two things: (i) The fact that it possesses the kind of necessity N ;
and (ii) the fact that it meets certain additional conditions. To use an example of
Fines,36 there is some plausibility to the idea that the concept of mathematical
necessity is defined from the notion of metaphysical necessity by restriction. I find
it attractive to say that a propositions being mathematically necessary consists
in its being metaphysically necessary for a certain reason, viz. the reason that
it is a mathematical truth. To say that a notion N is defined from a kind of
necessity N by relativization is to say that a propositions falling under concept
N consists in its being necessitated, relative to the kind of necessity N , by certain
propositions P. For example, it has some plausibility to say that the concept of
biological necessity is defined from the concept of metaphysical or conceptual
necessity by relativization to the laws of biology: a propositions being biologically
necessary consists in its being metaphysically or conceptually necessitated by the
laws of biology.37
In the remaining sections I will be concerned exclusively with those
modal notions that ascribe degrees of metaphysical inexorability, as conceptual,
264 / Boris Kment
metaphysical and nomic necessity do, whereas the concepts listed in (9) do not.
Whenever I speak of kinds of necessity in what follows, I will have only those
properties in mind.
3.5. A Defense of my Direction of Explanation

On the account propounded in this paper, for a world to be metaphysically
possible is simply for it to have at least a certain degree of closeness to the
actual world. When first presented with this account, many philosophers grant
its extensional correctness. They do not doubt that the metaphysically possible
worlds are closer than the impossible ones. But they deny that this is what their
metaphysical possibility consists in. Instead, they say, the modal notions are more
basic and, in some sense, prior to the notion of closeness. They believe that it is
the modal status of a world that explains its position in the closeness ordering:
the metaphysically possible worlds are closer than other worlds because they are
metaphysically possible.
Since this is a fairly common response to my view, I will address it in this
section. My discussion will take the form of a fictional dialogue with a proponent
of the response described in the last paragraph, whom I shall call Albert.
I: In section 3.1, I presented evidence which, I think, supports the claim that
necessity and possibility come in degrees: just as we can say that such-and-such
could have been the case, we can ask how easily a certain state of affairs could
have obtained. I noted that we evaluate claims about how easily a certain state
of affairs could have obtained by considering the worlds in which the state of
affairs obtains. The closer those worlds are to actuality, the greater the degree
of possibility of the state of affairs. When applied to worlds, this reduces to the
principle that the closer a world is, the greater its degree of possibility. I would
like a theory of necessity to be able to accommodate these findings. Can your
account do that?
Albert: Sure, it can. I agree that the evidence considered in section 3.1
supports the view that possibility of worlds comes in degrees. And the data about
the way we evaluate claims about degrees of possibility suggests that we take the
degree of possibility of a world to be higher the closer the world is. I therefore
agree that
(10) World w has a higher degree of possibility than world w if and only if
w is closer than w .
(10) tells us that the relations of comparative possibility and of comparative
closeness induce the same ordering of worlds, that they are, as we may put it,
perfectly correlated. But it does not say that the two relations are identical, and
the assumption of identity is not needed to make sense of the way we evaluate
claims about comparative possibility. I, for one, resist such an identification, since
I believe that modal classifications are prior to, and more basic than, the concept
of closeness.
I: What, then, do you make of the perfect correlation between the two
relations? How do you explain it? If we identify the two relations, as I propose
we do, then this question does not arise. But if we resist the identification, then
we need some explanation.
Albert: Consider again the fact that the metaphysically possible worlds are
closer than the metaphysically impossible worlds. I think that it is the special
modal status of the metaphysically possible worlds that explains their position
in the closeness ordering: the metaphysically possible worlds are closer than
other worlds because they are metaphysically possible. Now, the fact that the
metaphysically possible worlds are closer than the metaphysically impossible
worlds is just a special case of the general correlation between comparative
possibility and comparative closeness. We should expect to find a unified explanation of this correlation. Hence, if we say that the special position of the
metaphysically possible worlds in the closeness ordering is due to the fact that
they are metaphysically possible, then we should say that it is true quite generally
that a worlds degree of possibility determines and explains its position in the
closeness ordering. The closeness ordering, in turn, determines the truth-values
of counterfactuals in the familiar way: a counterfactual is true just in case its
consequent is true in the closest antecedent-worlds.
I: This account strikes me as unnecessarily complicated. If the relations of
comparative closeness and comparative possibility are perfectly correlated, then
we do not need both of them in the theory of counterfactuals, and it seems to be
a demand of good methodology to get rid of one of them. Instead of explaining
the closeness ordering by appeal to comparative possibility and then explaining
the truth-conditions of counterfactuals in terms of closeness, you could as well
directly define the counterfactual connective in terms of comparative possibility.
You could simply say that P ! Q is true just in case Q is true in those
P-worlds that have the highest degree of possibility.
Albert: So much the better. This move only makes my theory simpler and
more attractive. I can now do without the relation of closeness altogether. Instead,
I am using the notion of comparative possibility, which plays exactly the same
role in my theory as the concept of closeness does in the standard account of
counterfactuals.
I: I deny that you have really gotten rid of the closeness relation. The meaning
of the term closeness as used in the literature on counterfactuals (or at least as
I am using it) is determined by its theoretical role: closeness refers to whatever
relation induces the ordering of worlds that figures in the correct theory of
counterfactuals. If it is the relation of comparative possibility that induces this
ordering (as on your account), then the term closeness refers to the relation
of comparative possibility. Hence, the relations of comparative closeness and
comparative possibility are not distinct after all. They are one and the same
relation.
266 / Boris Kment
Now, it seems plausible that to say of a world that it is metaphysically possible

is to say something about its degree of possibility: it is to say that it has at
least such-and-such a degree of possibility. Given the identity of the relations
of comparative closeness and comparative possibility, this amounts to the view
that for a world to be metaphysically possible is for it to have at least a certain
degree of closeness. But this, of course, is just the account I am proposing in this
paper.
4. Defining Necessity
According to the results of the previous section, conceptual, metaphysical
and nomic necessity are different species of a common genus: each of them is a
propositions property of having at least a certain degree of inexorability. Each
of the three properties should therefore have a definition of the form:
(11) To be metaphysically (conceptually, nomically) necessary is to be true
throughout that sphere of worlds around the actual world that meets
condition C M (C C , C N ),38
where the term actual is, once again, to be understood in a non-rigid sense.
In order to complete our quest for a definition of metaphysical (conceptual,
nomic) necessity, we still need to find a suitable replacement for C M (C C ,
C N ). We must replace this dummy by the statement of some condition which,
in every possible world, singles out the sphere of all and only the metaphysically
(conceptually, nomically) possible worlds. This section will be devoted to finding
a suitable condition.
My strategy for achieving this goal will be somewhat indirect. I mentioned in
the introduction that I find it plausible that the modal properties of a proposition
need to be grounded in its non-modal features. In section 4.1 I will propose a
tentative answer to the question of which non-modal features can ground the
conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity of a proposition. I think that a
correct definition of necessity needs to be compatible with that answer. In section
4.2, I will motivate a specific way of completing the definitional schema (11) by
arguing that it yields a definition of necessity that meets that constraint.
4.1. What Grounds Modal Force?

It seems plausible to me that the special modal force of conceptually necessary propositions is grounded in their non-modal feature of being conceptual
truths. The cases of metaphysical and nomic necessity are a little more difficult.
In trying to develop a working account for these cases, we may start from
work by Kit Fine. As was described in section 1.3, Fine argued in detail, and
quite convincingly in my opinion, against modal definitions of the concepts of

essence and essentiality. However, even if the concepts of essence and essential
properties are not to be explained in modal terms, there is no denying that there
is a close connection between modality and the realm of essence. The obvious
suggestion, eloquently put forward by Fine,39 is that necessity in some way flows
from the essences or natures of things. The necessary truths are those that are true
in virtue of the natures of things. On one first-shot way of explaining this idea,
the metaphysically necessary truths are all and only those propositions that are
analytic consequences of true ascriptions to entities of their essential properties,
i.e. of truths of the form a is P, where P is an essential property of a.
Let me develop and revise this view a little bit. The true ascriptions of
essential properties include, it would seem, the proposition that Elvis is a human
being. But I do not think that this claim is itself metaphysically necessary. I think
that there are possible worlds in which Elvis does not exist. Moreover, I believe
that Elvis cannot have any properties in a world in which he does not exist,40
and therefore cannot have the property of humanity in such a world. This point,
of course, is a familiar one. And the obvious remedy is to say that, in order to
obtain a necessary truth, we need to conditionalize the proposition that Elvis is
human on the existence of Elvis. No comparable problem arises for the claim
that this conditionalized ascription of humanity to Elvis is necessary, provided
we understand the conditional connective used in it as a material conditional:
the proposition Elvis exists Elvis is human is equivalent to Either Elvis does
not exist or Elvis is human, and this proposition is true even at possible worlds in
which Elvis fails to exist.41
The conditionalization on existence yields a problem, however. It seems
plausible to me that the entities of pure mathematics exist necessarily. But the existence claims of mathematics are not analytic consequences of the conditionalized
statements of essential properties. (Suppose that a is some mathematical entity
and that P is one of as essential properties. The conditionalized ascriptions of
essential properties include the proposition a is P if a exists. But this proposition
does not entail that a exists.42 ) I therefore think that not all necessary truths are
analytic consequences of conditionalized essential truths. Some mathematical
truths are not.
In light of the foregoing considerations, I think that not all necessary truths
owe their modal status to the fact that they flow from the essential truths about
things. Many mathematical truths, such as the proposition that 2 exists, do not.
The most natural thing to say about them is that their modal status is simply
grounded in the fact that they are mathematical truths. It seems that there is
more than one non-modal property that can ground the special modal status of
a metaphysical necessity: some propositions are metaphysically necessary because
they flow from the essential properties of things, others are necessary because they
flow from the mathematical facts. This suggests the following, revised version of
Fines account: any necessary truth owes its special modal status to the fact that
it is underwritten by the mathematical and/or the conditionalized essential facts
268 / Boris Kment
about the world. I will use this view as my working account of the features that
ground the modal status of metaphysically necessary propositions.
I do not claim that this working account is right in all its details. It is enough
for my purposes if it is approximately correct. It might be that the mathematical
truths do not owe their special modal status to the fact that they are truths
of mathematics, but to some more general feature, e.g. to the fact that they
are truths that are purely about abstract entities, and not even in part about
the concrete world. Such a view would merit exploration. For the purposes of
this paper, however, I will make do with the working account stated in the last
paragraph.
Given our view about what grounds metaphysical necessity, it is not hard
to come up with an account of what grounds nomic necessity. On my account,
the extension of nomic necessity contains all and only those propositions that
are metaphysically necessitated by the truths about which principles are laws of
nature. It is therefore natural to think that every nomic necessity owes its special
modal status to the fact that it flows from the mathematical and (conditionalized)
essential truths and the truths about which principles are laws.
The reader may worry that the mathematical truths, the conditionalized
essential truths and the truths about which principles are laws do not form an
interesting and unified class. Why should it be precisely these three categories of
truths that are capable of grounding modal force? In section 5, I will try to assuage
such worries by arguing that, if we endorse the view I stated in this section, we
have an attractive way of cashing out the idea that the necessary propositions are
those propositions whose truth is underwritten by particularly deep features of
the world order. The picture I will sketch in section 5 will make it understandable
why it is precisely the relevant three categories of truth that ground the special
modal status of the metaphysical and nomic necessities.
4.2. Rules of Weighting, and the Definition of Necessity

A good account of necessity should be able to accommodate the finding that
the modal status of metaphysical and nomic necessities is grounded in the nonmodal properties mentioned in the last section. I will propose a simple-minded
way of meeting this condition.
In section 3.3, I left it open whether we should allow analytically inconsistent
worlds to figure in our account of counterfactuals, or whether we should define
the notion of a world in such a way as to make it true by definition that worlds are
analytically consistent. But I think that, if we allow for analytically inconsistent
worlds, then we should make the following principle part of our definition of the
concept of closeness:
I also claim that the following two principles are part of the definition of the
concept of closeness:
(R M ) Analytically consistent worlds in which all actual mathematical and
conditionalized essential truths hold are closer to the actual world
than all other worlds.
(R N ) Analytically consistent worlds in which all actual mathematical and
conditionalized essential truths hold, and which have the same laws
of nature as the actual world, are closer to the actual world than all
other worlds.
(If we do not allow for analytically inconsistent worlds, then the words analytically consistent can be deleted from (R M ) and (R N ).) The expression actual
in (8), (R M ) and (R N ) is to be understood in the non-rigid sense. As I said
in section 1.3, I take the notion of analytic consistency to be non-modal, and
therefore believe that we can make (8), (R M ) and (R N ) parts of our definition
of closeness without thereby importing any modal content into the notion of
closeness.
The degree of closeness between two worlds is the resultant of weighting
different similarities and dissimilarities between them. A theory of closeness
that incorporates the rules (R M ) and (R N ) suggests the following picture of the
principles for weighting similarities. These principles single out three disjoint sets
of truths and order them by the weight that attaches to the truth of them at
an analytically consistent antecedent-world: firstly, there are mathematical and
conditionalized essential truths. If all actual mathematical and conditionalized
essential truths hold at an analytically consistent antecedent-world, then this
makes the world closer than any world that does not meet this condition. Secondly, there are truths about which principles are laws. If all actual mathematical
and conditionalized essential truths and all actual truths about the laws hold
at an analytically consistent world, then this world is closer than any world that
does not meet this condition. Thirdly, there are truths about the individual events
that take place in the natural world. These truths carry less weight than truths
of the two other kinds.
On the basis of the foregoing considerations, I suggest the following definitions of conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessity:
To be conceptually necessary is to be true throughout the sphere around
the actual world that contains all and only the analytically consistent
worlds.
To be metaphysically necessary is to be true throughout the sphere around
the actual world that contains all and only those analytically consistent
worlds in which all actual mathematical and conditionalized essential truths
hold.
270 / Boris Kment
To be nomically necessary is to be true throughout the sphere around the

actual world that contains all and only those analytically consistent worlds
in which all actual mathematical and conditionalized essential truths hold
and which have the same laws of nature as the actual world.
Once again, the term actual is to be understood in the non-rigid way.
This account can accommodate the views discussed in section 4.1 about
which non-modal features ground the modal force of conceptual, metaphysical and nomic necessities. Consider the case of metaphysical necessity as an
example. Suppose that P is an analytic consequence of the mathematical and
(conditionalized) essential truths. According to (R M ), the analytically consistent
worlds in which all actual mathematical and conditionalized essential truths hold
form a sphere around the actual world. P is true throughout this sphere, and
in virtue of this fact P is metaphysically necessary. The reason why P is true
throughout the sphere is that it is an analytic consequence of the mathematical
and conditionalized essential truths. There is therefore a clear sense in which
the latter feature is what grounds Ps metaphysical necessity, what P owes its
metaphysical necessity to. This illustrates a general model for how we can explain
the fact that the modal status of a certain proposition P is grounded in one of
its non-modal features.
4.3. A Simpler Account?

I suggested that the metaphysical necessities are all and only the analytic
consequences of mathematical and conditionalized essential truths. If this is
true, an objector might say, why bring closeness and spheres into the account
of necessity at all? It seems much simpler to define metaphysical necessity as
follows:
(12) For a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be an
analytic consequence of the mathematical and conditionalized essential
truths.
I will argue that, despite its apparent simplicity, this account is not a viable
alternative.
In section 3.3 I said that a plausible account of metaphysical necessity should
permit us to identify the defining feature of the higher-order property of being a
kind of necessity. I argued that my account does that. Account (12), by contrast,
does not seem to offer a similar prospect of a unified account of the different
kinds of necessity. Note that an account of, e.g., nomic necessity in the same
spirit as (12) would probably run as follows:
To be nomically necessary is to be an analytic consequence of the mathematical and conditionalized essential truths and the truths about which principles
are laws of nature.
But what, on such a view, is the commonality between nomic necessity and
metaphysical necessity that makes them both kinds of necessity? Each of the
two kinds of necessity is the property of being an analytic consequence of a
certain set of propositions. But not every property of being a logical consequence
of a certain set of propositions is a kind of necessity. What distinguishes those
properties of this kind that are kinds of necessity from those that are not? The
account envisaged leaves us completely in the dark about the answer.
It is one of the most fundamental facts about metaphysical necessity that
it is a kind of necessity. Hence, whatever else is true of metaphysical necessity,
it must have the defining feature of the higher-order property of being a kind
of necessity. An account of metaphysical necessity that makes it a mystery what
this feature might be thereby lays itself open to the suspicion that it has failed to
capture that feature of metaphysical necessity which makes it a kind of necessity;
that it has, in fact, failed to capture that which makes it a modal property. But a
theory of metaphysical necessity that does not capture the fact that it is a modal
property must be fundamentally flawed.
I suspect that the account (12) will also be incapable of accommodating the
modalist intuition, and will thereby fail to achieve one of the central goals of a
metaphysical account of modality. According to the modalist intuition, it is the
distinctive feature of the metaphysical necessities that their truth is particularly
secure and inexorable. There must be some dimension of security or inexorability,
such that for a proposition to be necessary is simply for it to have a particularly
high value on that dimension. A good account of metaphysical necessity should
tell us what this dimension is. And it should offer as the defining feature of
metaphysical necessity the property of having a high value on that dimension.
The account I offered in this paper meets this condition: The inexorability of
a proposition is measured by the distance from the actual world to the closest
worlds in which it fails to be true, and necessity is defined as the property of
having a high value on that scale. But what about (12)? There is no mention of
the inexorability scale in this proposed definition of necessity.
The failure to accommodate the modalist intuition is ultimately the same as
the failure to explain what makes metaphysical necessity a kind of necessity. For
I argued in section 3.3 that what makes a property a kind of necessity is that it
is the property of having at least a certain degree of inexorability. The modalist
intuition therefore in effect amounts to the intuition that metaphysical necessity
is a kind of necessity.
I expect the proponent of (12) to reply as follows: I can see no reason
why I should not endorse the view outlined in section 3.1 about the dimension
of inexorability that is relevant: the inexorability of a truth is measured by the
distance from the actual world to the closest worlds in which the proposition
is false. It is true that this dimension of inexorability is not mentioned in my
definition of the concept of metaphysical necessity. But there is nonetheless a clear
sense in which, even on my account, the concept of metaphysical necessity singles
out a segment of the inexorability scale; for it singles out just those propositions
272 / Boris Kment
whose position on the inexorability scale is above a certain point. By the same
token, I can give an account of what makes a property a kind of necessity. What
the different kinds of necessity have in common is that each singles out the set
of just those propositions that are true in all worlds that are at most a certain
distance away from the actual world. And I can say that that is what makes those
different properties kinds of necessity.
Such an approach to modality would be rather close to my own. In particular,
its proponent would have foregone the one advantage that account (12) seemed to
have over my theory, namely its greater simplicity. It is true that the definition of
metaphysical necessity proffered in section 4.2 mentions spheres, whereas there is
no mention of them in (12). But if we combine (12) with the account mentioned
in the last paragraph of what makes a property a kind of necessity, then we have
not, after all, gotten rid of the story about closeness and spheres, with all its
complexity. We have just relocated it: instead of making it a part of the definition
of metaphysical necessity, we have only made it part of our account of what
makes metaphysical necessity a kind of necessity. Our overall theory of modality
has not become simpler.
Simplicity considerations are therefore not relevant to a decision between
the two accounts. Instead, we need to ask whether it is better to write the
connection between necessity and closeness into the definition of metaphysical
necessity, or to mention it only in the account of what makes metaphysical
necessity a kind of necessity. I think that the former option is better. Let me
briefly say why. The proponent of the rival account believes that the defining
feature of the property of being a kind of necessity is the property of singling
out those propositions that have a specific location on the inexorability scale.
But this location on the inexorability scale is not mentioned in her definition
of metaphysical necessity. This means that the fact that metaphysical necessity
is a kind of necessity is not reflected in her specification of what metaphysical
necessity is, in her proposed statement of the essence of metaphysical necessity.
On the rival account, it is therefore not an essential, but merely an accidental,
feature of metaphysical necessity that it is a kind of necessity. On the rival
account, one could know what metaphysical necessity is, and also know what
it is for a property to be a kind of necessity, and yet be in no position to know
that metaphysical necessity is a kind of necessity. But this, I think, is rather
implausible.
By the same token, I also believe that the rival account, even when developed
in the way suggested in the fictional reply of its proponent, still fails to accommodate the modalist intuition. As I said in sections 1.2 and 1.3, the modalist intuition
is an intuition about what it is for a proposition to be necessary, about the essence
of necessity. According to the modalist intuition, it is the essence of necessity to
be the property of having a high degree of inexorability. Whatever property of
the necessary propositions constitutes their high degree of inexorability must be
the defining feature of necessity, and must figure as such in a specification of the
essence of necessity. But when we now consider (12), it is obvious that the feature
that constitutes the high degree of inexorability of the necessary truthsthat of

being true in all worlds that are at most a certain distance away from the actual
worldis not mentioned in (12) at all; for (12) says nothing about closeness. (12)
therefore does not accommodate the modalist intuition.
5. The Grounding of the Modal in the Non-Modal

As I mentioned in sections 1.2 and 3.3, it seems intuitive that a necessary
proposition owes its modal status to the fact that its truth flows from particularly
deep features of the world order, so that its truth is secured by the fact that its
negation runs up against especially formidable obstacles. The deeper the features
of the world order from which the truth of the proposition flows, the higher
its degree of modal force. So far, I have only expressed this idea in purely
metaphorical terms. In this section I will try to make the idea a little bit clearer,
and try to show that my account can capture it.
More concretely, I will work on three tasks: I need to explain the nonmetaphorical content of talk about deep features of the world order. Moreover,
I will argue that on my account, degrees of depth are correlated with degrees of
necessity in the way described in the last paragraph. In section 4.1 I argued that
metaphysical necessities owe their modal status to the fact that they flow from the
mathematical and conditionalized essential truths, and that nomic necessities owe
their special modal force to the fact that they flow from the mathematical and
conditionalized essential truths, and truths about the laws. This view requires us
to be able to explain how these features of propositions are capable of grounding
modal force. Given the correlation between depth and modal force, this requires
showing that, in the relevant sense, there is something particularly deep and
fundamental about the mathematical and essential truths, and also (although to
a lesser degree) about the truths about the laws.
My discussion in this part of the paper will not be very rigorous. I will merely
attempt to give a rough and preliminary sketch of the intuitive picture underlying
my theory.
5.1. Counterfactuals and Explanation43

First, we need to consider some background facts about the relation of
closeness or overall similarity between worlds that enters into the standard truthconditions of counterfactuals. The degree of closeness between two worlds is the
resultant of weighting different similarities and dissimilarities between them.44
Not every respect of similarity carries non-zero weight. Some similarities between
worlds are simply irrelevant to closeness. I will propound a principle about which
similarities are relevant and which are not. I argue for this principle in detail in
my (2006). In this section, I will need to be brief.
274 / Boris Kment
Before stating my principle, I need to discuss a couple of examples that

motivate it. Let us begin by considering a kind of example that has been discussed
extensively in the literature on counterfactuals. Fred is about to toss a coin.
The coin-tossing setup is genuinely indeterministic and fair. You are looking
on. Immediately before the coin toss, someone offers you a bet on heads. You
decline. The coin comes up heads. It seems true to say, If you had betted on
heads, you would have won. But this presupposes that:
If you had betted on heads, the coin would still have come up heads.
Now consider:
If the coin had been tossed by Susie rather than by Fred, the coin would still
have come up heads.
Almost no one believes that this counterfactual is true. If Susie had tossed the
coin, then it might have come up heads, or it might have come up tails. It is not
true that it would have come up heads.
As our intuitive judgments about the counterfactuals show, in the first
example antecedent-worlds in which the coin toss has the same outcome as
in our world are (all other things being equal) closer than antecedent-worlds
in which it has a different outcome. By contrast, in the second example, some
antecedent-worlds with a different outcome are among the closest antecedentworlds. In other words, in the one case, the similarity in outcome contributes to
the closeness between the worlds, while in the other case it does not.
It is not difficult to come up with an intuitively plausible explanation for
this difference: Your decision whether or not to accept the bet does not make a
difference to the outcome; that is, it does not causally affect the outcome. This is
why we think that the outcome would have been just the same if you had made a
different decision. The second example is different. If Susie tosses the coin, then
the causal history of the outcome of the coin toss is different. Several authors
who discuss pairs of examples of this kind provide diagnoses that are at least
roughly along these lines.45
The above examples suggest, then, that
(c) Similarities between two worlds w and w with respect to individual
events contribute to the closeness between the worlds if and only if these
events have the same causal histories in the two worlds.46
I think that this point needs to be generalized and revised. My argument for
this generalization will rest on the following assumption:
(L) Where L is a law of nature and E is an event that instantiates L, the fact
that L is a law contributes to explaining E. Moreover, for any law L, the
fact that L is a law explains the general fact that events conform to L
(i.e. the fact that L is a law explains why L is true).47
To take an example, consider
(Law of Gravitation) Any two bodies of masses m 1 and m 2 that are at
distance d of each other attract one another with a
force of strength Gm 1 m 2 /d 2 ,
where G is the gravitational constant. Assume that (Law of Gravitation) is a law
of nature. Last week, Mars took a certain path through space in accordance with
(Law of Gravitation). I believe that the fact that (Law of Gravitation) is a law is
one of the factors that together explain why Mars took the path it did. And I
also believe that the fact that (Law of Gravitation) is a law explains the general
fact that events conform to (Law of Gravitation); that is, it explains why bodies
of masses m 1 and m 2 that are at distance d of each other attract one another
with a force of strength Gm 1 m 2 / d 2 .
(L) seems very plausible to me. Most other people I have asked find the
principle plausible, too, and this makes me hope that the reader will find it
reasonable as well. Unfortunately, any serious discussion of (L) would have to
take up a lot of space, and is therefore beyond the scope of this paper.48
Now suppose that (Law of Gravitation) is a fundamental law of our world,
i.e. that it is a law, and that this fact cannot be explained by appeal to other, more
fundamental laws. Consider,
(13) If (Law of Gravitation) had not been a law, then events would still have
at least approximately conformed to it.
No one I asked believed that this counterfactual was true.
How can we explain our unwillingness to accept (13)? I will focus on an
explanation with considerable intuitive appeal. The only reason why events
conform to (Law of Gravitation) in our world is that (Law of Gravitation) is
a law. But that reason is absent in an antecedent-world. Hence, even if the events
of an antecedent-world (approximately or even perfectly) conform to (Law of
Gravitation), their conformity to the law does not have the same explanation as
in our world. That is why it contributes nothing to closeness. Antecedent-worlds
that conform to (Law of Gravitation) are no closer than those that do not. This
is why there is no reason for accepting (13).
The foregoing considerations suggest the following generalization of (c):
(C) If some fact f obtains in both of two worlds, then this similarity
contributes to the closeness between the two worlds if and only if f
has the same explanation in the two worlds. (In the special case in which
276 / Boris Kment
f has no explanation in either world, this condition counts as vacuously

satisfied.)49,50
I argue in my (2006) (sct. 8) that this formulation is a little bit too simple. But I think that it can serve as a working account for our present
purposes.
I am using the term explanation in (C) in what is sometimes called the
ontic sense (Salmon 1984). On this reading, the term explanation expresses
an objective metaphysical, non-epistemic relation: to say that fact f is one of
the facts that jointly explain fact g is to say that f is part of the reason why g
obtains, that f is one of the factors that jointly give rise to, or are responsible
for, g. I take causation to provide the paradigmatic examples of the relation I
have in mind: if X is a cause of Y , then X is one of the factors that are jointly
responsible for, or explain, Y . (The reason why the ball started to move is that the
player kicked it. The kick is one of the factors that explain the balls beginning
to move.) However, I think that the relation of one things explaining another is
more general than that of causation, that it can hold between things that cannot
cause each other. We have already considered an example: I believe that the fact
that (Law of Gravitation) is a law explains why events conform to this law (but it
would be odd to say that the lawhood of the law causes events to conform to the
law). Similarly, I think that the lawhood of one law can explain the lawhood of
another; for example, the fact that (Law of Gravitation) is a law might explain why
Keplers Laws are laws. Mathematics supplies additional examples. I think that
mathematical truths often explain other mathematical truths: one mathematical
fact can be the reason why another mathematical fact obtains. Moreover, truths
of mathematics often contribute to explaining why certain laws of nature are laws.
For example, the lawhood of derived quantitative laws can be explained by that
of more fundamental quantitative laws and the mathematical truths that are used
in the derivation.
So much for examples of the relation of explanation. I will assume that the
relation is transitive. If f is one of the factors that explain g and g is one of the
factors that explain h, then f is one of the factors that explain h.
5.2. Explanatory Depth and Modal Force

Let the nodes in the diagram below represent the individual facts that obtain
in our world. An arrow leading from one node to another symbolizes that the
fact represented by the first node contributes to explaining the fact represented
by the second node. Given the assumption that explanation is transitive, if a chain
of arrows leads from one node to another, then the fact represented by the first
node contributes to explaining the fact represented by the second. f , for example,
contributes to explaining g.
Diagram 1
According to principle (C) of section 5.1, the closeness of an analytically

consistent world is determined by weighting its different similarities to our world
in facts that have the same explanations as in our world. We can imagine that
every fact F represented in Diagram 1 has a certain number x attached to it. If
an analytically consistent world w shares F with our world and F has the same
explanation in w and in our world, then the sharing of F contributes with weight
x to the closeness of w to our world. If w shares F with our world but F does
not have the same explanation in w and in our world, then the sharing of F has
zero weight.
Now, consider the questions: How close are the closest worlds in which f
fails to obtain, and how close are the closest worlds in which g fails to obtain?
Suppose that it is analytically consistent to assume that f fails to obtain and also
analytically consistent to assume that g fails to obtain, so that (according to (8))
the closest no-f worlds and the closest no-g worlds are analytically consistent
Diagram 2
278 / Boris Kment
worlds. According to the results of section 5.1, the closest no-g worlds are those
analytically consistent no-g worlds that maximize match in facts with the same
explanations as in our world. We can represent the situation diagrammatically:
g and facts that are explained (at least in part) by g are represented by asterisks
in Diagram 2, while all other facts are represented by dots. g cannot obtain in
any analytically consistent no-g world. And if one of the other facts represented
by asterisks obtains in a no-g world w, it cannot have the same explanations as
in our world, and the sharing of the fact is therefore irrelevant to the closeness
between w and our world. Only match in facts represented by dots (dot facts,
for short) can contribute to closeness. The closest no-g worlds will be those
analytically consistent worlds that maximize match in dot facts that have the
same explanations as in our world. If there are analytically consistent no-g worlds
that share all the dot facts with our world, then these will be the closest no-g
worlds.
Of course, there may be no such worlds. It could be that the dot facts of
Diagram 2the facts that are not g and are not explained by gtogether entail
g, so that no analytically consistent no-g world can contain all the dot facts. There
are many cases of this kind. Suppose, e.g. that determinism is true,51 and that
causation always proceeds forward in time. Let x be the fact that a specific kind
of event occurred at time t. Given the temporal asymmetry of causation, x does
not contribute to explaining any events before t. x also does not contribute to
explaining any laws of nature (for laws of nature are not explained by individual
events).52 But under determinism the facts about the worlds history before t,
together with the laws of nature, entail that x obtains.53 Hence, either the history
before t is different in the closest no-x worlds, or some actual law is violated
in these worlds (and thus fails to be true), or both.54 To take another example,
suppose that L 0 is a fundamental law of nature, and that L 1 is a derived law
whose lawhood is explained by the lawhood of L 0 and by certain mathematical
truths that are used in the derivation. The fact that L 0 is a law and the relevant
mathematical truths jointly entail that L 1 is a law. Thus, there are facts that are
distinct from the fact that L 1 is a law and are not explained by the lawhood of
L 1 , and which jointly entail that L 1 is a law, and some of these facts must be
absent in the closest worlds in which L 1 fails to be a law.
If the dot facts of Diagram 2 entail g, then in every analytically consistent
no-g world some of the dot facts are absent. But the closest no-g worlds are those
that maximize match in dot facts with the same explanations. Hence, they contain
most of the dot facts of Diagram 2. Let us say, for the sake of definiteness, that
h is absent in the closest no-g worlds (which means that match with respect to
facts that are actually explained by h cannot contribute to the closeness of these
worlds, so that the facts that are actually explained by h might also be absent
in the closest no-g worlds), but that all dot facts except h and the facts actually
explained by h are present in the closest no-g worlds. Thus, the facts represented
by dots in Diagram 3 are all and only those actual facts that obtain in the closest
no-g worlds and have the same explanations as in our world:
Diagram 3
Now ask yourself what the closest worlds in which f fails to obtain look
like. Once again, the closest no-f worlds will be those analytically consistent no-f
worlds that maximize match in facts with the same explanations as in our world.
The asterisks in Diagram 4 represent f and the facts explained (at least in part)
by f . All other facts are represented by dots.
Diagram 4
f cannot obtain in any analytically consistent no-f world, and if other asterisk
facts of Diagram 4 obtain in an analytically consistent no-f world w, they
cannot have the same explanations as in our world, and the match in those
facts is therefore irrelevant to the closeness between w and our world. The only
similarities between an analytically consistent no-f world and the actual world
that can be relevant to closeness are similarities in the dot facts of Diagram 4.
280 / Boris Kment
But even if the dot facts of Diagram 4 are jointly analytically consistent with the
non-obtaining of f , so that there is an analytically consistent no-f world that
shares all the dot facts with our world, the combined weight of these similarities
is smaller than the combined weight of match in the facts represented by dots
in Diagram 3, simply because the dot facts of Diagram 4 are a proper subset of
those of Diagram 3. Hence, the closest no-f worlds are less close than the closest
no-g worlds. The difference in closeness is even more striking if the dot facts of
Diagram 4 are jointly analytically inconsistent with the non-obtaining of f , so
that there are no analytically consistent no-f worlds that share all of these facts
with our world.
The upshot of the foregoing considerations (which were not rigorous, and
were merely intended to convey the intuitive picture) is the following rule of
thumb:
(D) By and large, if a fact f is explanatorily prior to a fact g, in the sense that
f contributes to explaining g but not vice versa,55 then the closest no-f
worlds are farther away than the closest no-g worlds; that is, f could
less easily have failed to obtain than g.56
For the most part, if f is represented by a node closer to the bottom of Diagram 1
than g, then the truth that f obtains is more secure and inexorable than the truth
that g obtains. By and large, the more explanatorily basic and fundamental a fact
is (the greater the range of facts which it underlies and explains), the greater its
degree of necessity.57
5.3. Mathematical Truths and Truths about the Laws

With principle (D) in mind, let us return to the principles of weighting
that we considered in section 4.2. According to these principles, it is of the
first importance to hold fixed the mathematical and conditionalized essential
truths, and of the second importance to hold fixed the truths about what the
laws are; it is less important to hold fixed truths about individual events. Let us
leave aside the conditionalized essential truths for the moment (I will consider
them in detail in section 5.4), and center on the other three classes of truths.
It seems to me that there are what we might call explanatory asymmetries
between these classes of truths. It seems plausible to me that truths of pure
mathematics often contribute to explaining facts about lawhood. For example, the
lawhood of derived quantitative laws is explained by that of more fundamental
quantitative laws and the mathematical truths that are used in the derivation.
Moreover, by explaining facts about lawhood, truths of mathematics can figure
in the explanations of events. The converse, however, does not hold. No truth
of pure mathematics is explained, in whole or in part, by facts about which
principles are laws of nature or by the events in the natural world. The relation
between the class of facts about lawhood and the class of facts about individual
events is exactly parallel: while facts about which principles are laws contribute
to explaining facts about individual events (in accordance with principle (L) of
section 5.1), facts about individual events do not explain facts about lawhood. (It
it important not to misunderstand these theses of explanatory asymmetry. I do
not, of course, claim that every mathematical fact figures in the explanation of
every truth about what the laws are, or even that every mathematical fact figures
in the explanation of some members of the category of truths about the laws.
My thesis is that there is an explanatory asymmetry between the two categories
or classes of propositions, not that there is an explanatory asymmetry between
every individual mathematical truth and every individual truth about lawhood.
The explanatory asymmetry between the categories consists in the fact that some
members of the category of mathematical truths figure in the explanation of some
members of the category of truths about the laws, whereas no truths about the laws
figure in the explanation of any mathematical truths. Similarly for the relationship
between the class of truths about lawhood and the class of truths about individual
events.)
The foregoing considerations suggest the following picture: There is a
classification of facts that carves nature at its joints, that corresponds to an
important metaphysical distinction. On the one side of it, there are the facts that
are, at least in part, about the realm of concrete entities, on the other side there
lie the facts of pure mathematics (and perhaps other facts as wellperhaps all
facts that are purely about abstract entities). Facts of the first kind are further
subdivided into those about which laws govern the realm of concrete objects,
and those about the individual events that occur in the concrete realm. These
three major metaphysical categories of facts are ordered with respect to how
explanatorily fundamental they are: the class of mathematical facts (or: of all facts
about pure abstract entities?) is explanatorily prior to, or more fundamental than,
the class of facts about concrete entities. And among the facts about concrete
entities, those about the laws that govern the concrete realm are explanatorily
more fundamental than those about individual events. This ordering of the three
classes of facts by their degree of explanatory fundamentality is represented in
Facts about
Facts about
individual events
the laws of nature
Mathematical facts
(All facts about pure abstract entities?)
Diagram 5
Facts about
concreta
282 / Boris Kment
the diagram. The more fundamental facts are lower in the diagram, and arrows
indicate explanatory relations in the usual way.
Our rules for determining the closeness ordering of worlds follow the contours of these three fundamental metaphysical categories of facts. In accordance
with principle (D), they determine that the closest worlds in which the actual
truths of mathematics fail to hold are less close than the closest worlds with
different laws of nature, and that the latter are, in turn, less close than worlds
that differ from ours only with respect to the individual events that occur in the
natural world.
Let us look at the same issue from a slightly different angle. Suppose that
you want to know what would have been the case if a certain fact x had not
obtained. (I will once again assume that it is analytically consistent to say that x
fails to obtain, so that (according to (8)) the closest no-x worlds are analytically
consistent worlds.) You need to find out what the closest no-x worlds are like.
Now, given that x actually obtains, the totality of all facts is obviously analytically
inconsistent with the non-obtaining of x. Hence, not all actual facts can obtain
in the closest no-x worlds. The question is which of the actual facts obtain in
these worlds.
How can we find the answer to this question? Think of it as a game. You
are given Diagram 1, and you need to remove enough nodes from the diagram
to ensure that the facts represented by the remaining nodes are analytically
consistent with the assumption that x does not obtain. Whenever you remove
one of the nodes, n, from the diagram, every node to which a chain of arrows
leads from n also disappears. Each of the nodes is assigned a certain number,
which measures the weight with which the sharing of this fact contributes to the
closeness between two worlds if the fact has the same explanation in the two
worlds. You remove nodes from the diagram until you reach a point at which the
remaining nodes represent facts that are jointly analytically consistent with the
non-obtaining of x. At this point, your score will equal the sum of the numbers
assigned to the nodes that remain in the diagram. The goal of the game is to
maximize this final score. Each optimal way of playing the game (each way of
playing the game that maximizes the final score) corresponds to a set of closest
no-x worlds, namely those analytically consistent no-x worlds that share with
our world all the facts represented by nodes that remain in the diagram at the
end of the game.
It is important for our purposes to take into account one important rule of
strategy of the game: consider again the facts f and g represented in Diagram 1. f
is explanatorily prior to g, i.e. f figures in the explanation of g but not vice versa.
(Thus, there is a chain of arrows that lead from the node representing f to the one
representing g, but there is no chain of arrows leading from the g-node to the f node.) Now, suppose that in your attempt to achieve analytic consistency with the
non-obtaining of x, you are wondering whether to remove the dot representing f
or the one representing g. If you remove f , then you will lose the points attached
to f , as well as those attached to the facts that are actually explained by f . If you
remove g, you will lose the points attached to g, as well as those attached to the
facts that are actually explained by g. The latter set of facts is a proper subset of
the former. Hence, by removing f you would lose more points than by removing
g. In consequence, it seems that, ceteris paribus, removing g is the better option.
More generally, when, in reasoning hypothetically from a certain assumption, we
need to choose between holding fixed a fact g and holding fixed another fact f
that is explanatorily prior to g, we should, all other things being equal, hold f
fixed.
Given that the aforementioned three classes of truthsthe mathematical
truths, the truths about the laws, and those about the individual events in the
natural worldare ordered by explanatory priority, we can now see that the
strategic principle described in the previous paragraph is enshrined in principles
(R M ) and (R N ) of section 4.2. For what these rules tell us is that we should
choose to hold fixed the mathematical truths over holding fixed the truths about
the laws, and the truths about the laws over the truths about individual events. In
other words, we should choose to hold fixed truths from the explanatorily more
fundamental metaphysical categories of truths over holding fixed truths from the
explanatorily less fundamental categories.
5.4. Essential Truths

So far, I have discussed only two of the three classes of propositions
mentioned in (R M ) and (R N ). It remains to deal with the third class: the
conditionalized essential truths. It seems plausible to me that the same kind of
explanatory asymmetry that holds between the classes of propositions discussed
in this section so far also holds between the essential truths about a thing and
the accidental truths about the same thing: the essential properties of the thing
usually explain many of the accidental properties, but not vice versa. For example,
it seems plausible to me that it is an essential property of water to be made up
molecules that consist of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The fact
that water has this molecular structure contributes to explaining many of its
other (observable and unobservable) properties, but it cannot itself be explained
by appeal to other properties of water. Waters having the microstructure it does
is its deepest explanatory feature. When we are in the business of explaining some
of the properties of water by others of its properties, we can trace back many of its
accidental properties to its property of having the molecular structure H 2 O, but
we cannot trace the latter property to anything that is explanatorily still deeper.
Once we have explained the other features by appeal to the microstructure of
water, we have reached explanatory bedrock.
Consider another example: it seems plausible to me that organisms have
their origins essentially. For instance, I believe that it is essential to Fred to have
originated from the sperm and egg he actually did. Now, Freds property of
originating from this sperm and egg contributes to explaining many of the other
284 / Boris Kment
properties Fred has. (For instance, the fact that Fred originated from sperm Bob
and egg cell Susie, together with certain properties of Bob and Susie (e.g. the
property of containing certain genes), might contribute to explaining why Fred
has a certain height.) But it seems to me that we cannot, in turn, explain why Fred
originated from Bob and Susie by appealing to any other properties of Fred. We
can causally explain the properties that Fred had at various times by appealing to
properties he had at earlier times, and we can explain those properties by other
properties he had at yet earlier times, and so forth. But when, in tracing back
the causal chain in this way, we have arrived at Freds property of originating
from Bob and Susie, we cannot go back any further to properties Fred had at yet
earlier times, since Fred did not exist at any earlier times (before he originated
from the two gametes). Freds property of originating from Bob and Susie is
the terminus of the causal chain that links Freds different properties, just as the
microstructure of water is the terminus of the explanatory chain that links the
different properties of water.58
Like the distinction between mathematical facts and facts about the concrete
realm, and like the distinction among the latter facts between those about what
the laws are and those about individual events, the distinction between the
essential and the accidental facts about an entity can plausibly be regarded as a
metaphysically very important distinction, a distinction that carves nature at its
joints. Our principles of weighting similarities between worlds follow the contours
of these metaphysical categories of facts about an entity. Under the influence of
(D), the weight ordering once again follows the explanatory ordering: the essential
truths about an entity are given greater weight than the accidental truths. When
deciding whether to hold fixed a certain essential truth about an entity or a
certain accidental truth, we should not choose to hold fixed the accidental truth
over holding fixed the essential truth. We should hold fixed the essential truths
if we hold fixed any truths about the entity.
(R M ) enshrines this principle, as is easy to see. (R M ) lays down that the analytically consistent worlds in which all actual mathematical and conditionalized
essential truths hold are closer than all other worlds. Now, as I said in section
2.3 (and as is proven in the appendix), this implies that, for any proposition P
that is analytically consistent with all mathematical and conditionalized essential
truths, all mathematical and conditionalized essential truths would still have been
true if P had been true. Hence, (R M ) lays down that (provided the antecedent
of a counterfactual is analytically consistent with the mathematical truths and
the conditionalized essential truths) the conditionalized essential truths are to be
held fixed. This rule in effect guarantees that the essential truths about an entity
will be held fixed as long as any true ascription of a property to the entity is held
fixed. For let P be any property of a, and let E be some essential property of the
entity a. Suppose that we are wondering what would have happened if a certain
antecedent A had been true (where A is analytically consistent with all truths
of mathematics and conditionalized essential truths). Suppose that we hold fixed
the truth that a has property P. Since (in my view) this truth entails that a exists,59
we also need to hold fixed the existence of a. But if we hold fixed the existence of
a, and also hold fixed all the conditionalized ascriptions of essential properties
to a, then we need to hold fixed all unconditionalized essential truths about a as
well. So, (R M ) guarantees that, if we hold fixed any true ascriptions of properties
to a, we need also to hold fixed all true ascriptions of essential properties to a.
As I mentioned in sections 1.2 and 3.3, it seems intuitively plausible that a
proposition that has a high degree of necessity owes this special modal status to
the fact that it is a consequence of propositions that state particularly deep and
fundamental features of the world order. The deeper these features, the higher the
degree of necessity that attaches to the proposition. The results of this section
allow us to make the ideas of depth and fundamentality a little more precise:
According to (D), what matters is the explanatory fundamentality of the facts that
make a proposition true. By and large, if the truth of a proposition flows from the
explanatorily most fundamental and basic facts of the world, then the proposition
has a high degree of necessity. I suggested above that the difference in degree of
necessity between mathematical truths, truths about the laws and truths about
individual events is grounded in the differences in explanatory depth between
these three ontological categories of propositions. The special modal force of
conditionalized essential truths derives from the relative explanatory depth of
the essential truths about the entity, compared to the accidental truths about the
same entity.
The picture I sketched in the foregoing sections is connected to a certain
strategy I endorse for explaining why our counterfactual connective is governed
by principles (R M ) and (R N ). I cannot state this explanation in this paper. I will
merely sketch the explanatory strategy and leave it to another occasion to fill in
the details.
Counterfactuals serve a number of practical purposes. They figure, e.g., in
decision-making (If I were to do such-and-such, then such-and-such would
happen). Moreover, we use them to establish claims about the explanatory
interrelations between different facts. (Suppose we know that q would not have
been the case if p had not been the case. Given certain background assumptions,
we can conclude that the fact that p plays a role in explaining the fact that
q.) In order for counterfactuals to serve their purposes adequately, the rules
that determine the closeness ordering need to have certain features, and we can
appeal to the purposes of counterfactuals to give a functional explanation of these
features. I think that it can be shown, for example, that the rules defining the
closeness ordering need to incorporate principle (C) in order for counterfactuals
to adequately serve their purpose in establishing claims about the explanatory
relations between different facts. As we saw above, this means that these rules
need to conform to the constraint stated by (D). Moreover, if counterfactual
reasoning is to be a useful reasoning strategy, then the rules that determine the
closeness ordering ought to be easy for us to handle. In order for this to be so,
they should rest on a classification of truths that is easy to apply. This will be so
if they rest on a classification that follows the contours of a conspicuous division
286 / Boris Kment
of truths into fundamental ontological categories. As we saw above, (R M ) and

(R N ) rest on such a classification of truths. These two rules therefore satisfy the
desiderata of conforming to (D) and being straightforward to apply.60
6. A Non-Modal Account of the Closeness Relation

In the foregoing sections, I have offered an account of modal properties of
propositions in terms of the modal notion of comparative closeness. In order to
complete the reduction of the modal to the non-modal, we still need an account
of the closeness relation in non-modal terms. In this section, I will draw on the
results of the previous discussion and on those of my (2006) to give a partial
account of closeness.
The closeness ordering is the resultant of weighting different similarities
between worlds, and we can define the closeness relation by specifying what
weights attach to the different respects of similarity. In section 4.2, I stated some
principles about the way similarities between analytically consistent worlds ought
to be weighed against each other: match in mathematical and conditionalized
essential truths carries the most weight, match in facts about what the laws are
is next in the ordering, match in facts about individual events carries less weight
than similarities of the first two kinds. It remains to consider how similarities
with respect to individual events are to be weighted against each other.
Truths about such events come in two forms: on the one hand, there are
what we may call particular truths about events, or matters of particular fact:
truths about which events occur in the individual regions of space-time. The
truth that I had coffee for breakfast this morning is an example. On the other
hand, there are general truths about events: generalizations about individual
events, i.e. truths about the general patterns that can be found in the events that
occur in the world. Among these generalizations, we can distinguish between
laws of nature, such as (Law of Gravitation) of section 5.1, and accidental
generalizations (generalizations that do not have the status of laws). We know
from Nelson Goodmans work61 that laws can support counterfactuals, while
accidental regularities cannot. In other words, the degree to which other worlds
conform to the actual laws often matters to their closeness, while the degree to
which they conform to the accidental regularities of the actual world is never
relevant. We can therefore ignore accidental regularities in what follows, and
concentrate on matters of particular fact and laws.
A law of nature must be distinguished from the fact that it is a law. For
instance, (Law of Gravitation) is distinct from the fact that (Law of Gravitation) is
a law. On my view, the two truths are two-way independent: (Law of Gravitation)
is true in some metaphysically possible worlds where it is not a law. Hence, (Law
of Gravitation) does not entail that (Law of Gravitation) is a law. Conversely,
since I believe that laws of nature can have exceptions, and therefore do not
think that a law of nature must be, strictly speaking, true, I do not think that
the proposition that (Law of Gravitation) is a law entails (Law of Gravitation).

There are metaphysically possible worlds in which (Law of Gravitation) is a law,
but is not true without exception.
Principle (C) tells us that not all similarities in truths about individual events
are relevant to the closeness between two worlds. Such similarities matter only if
they concern truths that have the same explanations in the two worlds. It remains
to consider how we ought to weight different kinds of similarity in truths about
individual events that meet this condition. For reasons discussed in detail in my
(2006),62 I accept a modified version of David Lewiss answer to this question.
Let us call a violation of the actual laws that occurs in some other world but
does not occur in the actual world an alien violation. I think that large and
conspicuous alien violations of the actual laws detract more from the closeness of
another world than small and inconspicuous alien violations. While small alien
violations can be outweighed by increases in match in matters of particular fact,
large alien violations cannot be outweighed in this way. All other things being
equal, if w has a greater amount of match in matters of particular fact than w
but w contains more large and conspicuous alien violations of the actual laws,
then w is closer than w. All other things being equal, if w contains more small
and inconspicuous alien violations of the actual laws than w but w also has a
greater amount of match in matters of particular fact, then w is closer than w .
We have arrived at the following principles for weighting the similarities of
an analytically consistent world w to the actual world:
1. It is most important to ensure that all actual mathematical and conditionalized essential truths holds in w.
2. It is of the second importance to ensure sameness of the laws.
3. It is of the third importance to avoid large and conspicuous alien
violations of the actual laws, provided the facts that explain the conformity
of events to these laws in the actual world also obtain in w.
4. It is of the fourth importance to maximize match in matters of particular
fact with the same explanations.
5. It is of the fifth importance to avoid small and inconspicuous alien
violations of the actual laws, provided the facts that explain the conformity
of events to these laws in the actual world also obtain in w.63
As before, the term actual is to be understood in a non-rigid sense.
So far, we have considered how similarities between analytically consistent
worlds are to be weighed against each other. If we allow for analytically inconsistent worlds, we only need to make one small modification to our system
of weights, in order to accommodate (8): we need to add that the single most
important factor in determining the degree of closeness of another world w
to the actual world is whether or not w is analytically consistent. Analytically
inconsistent worlds are less close than analytically consistent worlds. The relative
weighting of all other closeness-relevant factors remains the same.
288 / Boris Kment
7. The Utility of the Concept of Necessity

I mentioned in the introduction that it is one of the advantages of the present
account of modality that it permits us to see why the notion of metaphysical
necessity is useful to us: it facilitates counterfactual reasoning. Let me expand
on this idea.
Counterfactual thoughts have a number of important functions in our
thinking. We use them, for instance, when trying to explain things (It is only
because of you that he is not here. He would have come if you had not been so
nasty to him.), and when thinking about the likely outcomes of a contemplated
course of action (If I were to call him now, he would be able to come tomorrow).
It is therefore important for a variety of ordinary-life purposes to evaluate
counterfactuals.
As we noted in section 2.1, one common way of establishing a counterfactual
P ! Q is by a technique of hypothetical reasoning. To borrow an example
from Jackson,64 suppose that we want to know whether Frank would get hurt
if he were to jump from the window of his tenth-floor apartment. We might
start by hypothetically entertaining the hypothesis that Frank jumps, and then
adding further truths as supplementary premises according to certain rules: the
propositions that there is no net that could break Franks fall, that the street is
a hundred feet below the window, that bodies gain a high speed when falling a
hundred feet, that human beings get hurt when hitting an asphalted surface at
that speed, and so forth. Finally, we can reason from these propositions and our
hypothetical assumption that Frank jumps from the window to the conclusion
that Frank gets hurt. This shows that the counterfactual is true.65,66
Of course, we cannot add just any old truth as supplementary premise to
the antecedent. Even though Frank never in fact jumps out of his window, we
cannot simply add the assumption that he does not. We can hold fixed a truth
P in reasoning hypothetically from an antecedent A if and only if P is cotenable
with A, i.e. if and only if P would still have been true if A had been true.67 Hence,
before we can use a proposition as supplementary premise, we need to make sure
that it is cotenable with the antecedent. This means that hypothetical reasoning
needs to be based on rules that permit us to determine which propositions are
cotenable with a given antecedent.
(R M ) is such a rule. For (R M ) entails that all analytic consequences of the set
S of all mathematical and conditionalized essential truths are cotenable with every
antecedent that is analytically consistent with S. This is a corollary of the result
proven in the appendix, and it is easy to see that it holds: (R M ) lays down that the
analytically consistent worlds in which all propositions in S hold form a sphere
around the actual world. Suppose that P is a proposition that is analytically
consistent with S, and is therefore true in some world in the sphere specified
in (R M ). Since the worlds in that sphere are closer than all other worlds, the
P-worlds in the sphere are the closest P-worlds. This means that all propositions
that are true throughout this sphere must be true in the closest P-worlds, and must
therefore be cotenable with P. But the propositions that are true throughout the
sphere are all and only the analytic consequences of S. The analytic consequences
of S are therefore available as ancillary premises in reasoning from any antecedent
that is analytically consistent with S.
Applications of (R M ) in hypothetical reasoning are very common. Assume
that we are reasoning from an antecedent that is analytically consistent with the
set S of all mathematical and conditionalized essential truths. Let P and Q be
two truths, and suppose that P is an analytic consequence of S, but Q is not. If P
and Q are individually but not jointly analytically consistent with the antecedent,
then at most one of them can be used as ancillary premise. We can apply (R M ) to
conclude that it is P, and not Q, that can be used. It is easy to think of ordinarylife examples in which we are using (R M ) in this way. Suppose that Susie, a shop
keeper, receives $10 from one of her customers and $20 from another. What if
the two customers together had given her, not $30, but $50? When reasoning
hypothetically from this antecedent, we cannot use both the mathematical truth
that 10 + 20 = 50, and the truth that the two customers gave Susie $10 and $20
respectively. We can regard only one of these propositions as cotenable with the
antecedent, and there is no doubt that it is the mathematical truth that we would
regard as cotenable: We would say that if Susie had received $50 from the two
customers, then at least one of them would have given her more money than he
actually did. We would not say that the sum of 10 and 20 would have been 50.
As for mathematical truths, so for true ascriptions of essential properties.
We can use a Kripkean example to illustrate the point. Imagine a situation in
which people usually use a certain odorless, colorless, tasteless liquid to quench
their thirst, brush their teeth, brew their coffee, etc. More generally, they use that
liquid in just the way in which we use water in our world. However, the liquid
they use is not composed of hydrogen and oxygen, but of some other elements.
What if a situation of this kind had obtained? We would say that, if that had been
the case, people would have used some stuff other than water to quench their
thirst, brush their teeth, and so forth. I think that we would not say that the stuff
used for these purposes would have been water, but that water would not have
been composed of hydrogen and oxygen. In this example, the antecedent (People
usually use a certain colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid that is not composed of
hydrogen and oxygen to quench their thirst, etc.) is analytically consistent with
each of the following two truths, but not with their conjunction:
Water (if it exists) is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.
Water is the colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid that people usually use to
quench their thirst, brush their teeth, etc.
At most one of these propositions can be used as ancillary premise in hypothetical
reasoning from the antecedent. As our reactions show, it is the first proposition
that we regard as permissible auxiliary premise. This is simply an application of
(R M ): it is essential to water to be a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Therefore,
290 / Boris Kment
according to (R M ), the proposition that water (if it exists) is composed of these

elements is cotenable with the antecedent.
Now, when a speaker wants to use (R M ) in hypothetical reasoning from a
given antecedent, she needs to proceed in two steps:
(1) First, she needs to find out whether (R M ) applies to the antecedent at
issue, and in order to do that, she must determine whether the antecedent
has the property of being true in some world in the sphere of worlds
specified in (R M ). Determining whether a given antecedent has this
property is thus a routine task that speakers face when applying (R M ).
It would therefore be useful for the speakers to have the concept of that
property. On my account, they do. It is the concept of metaphysical
possibility.
(2) Suppose that a speaker has ascertained that the antecedent A is true
in some world in the sphere specified by (R M ). She can conclude that
all the propositions that are true throughout this sphere are cotenable
with A, and are therefore available as ancillary premises in reasoning
hypothetically from A. In order to make use of this knowledge, she
needs now to determine which propositions have the property of being
true throughout the sphere. Determining whether a proposition has this
property is therefore a routine task in evaluating counterfactuals, and it
would surely be very useful for the users of counterfactuals to have the
concept of that property. On my account, they do. It is the concept of
metaphysical necessity.
8. Conclusion
In section 1 of this paper, I argued that a good theory of modality should
combine an attractive metaphysical account of necessity with a plausible theory of
our practice of modalizing. I also described a number of ideas about necessity that
I think a good metaphysical account of modality should be able to capture: the
otherworldliness intuition, the modalist intuition, and the thought that the modal
status of a necessary proposition is grounded in its non-modal feature of flowing
from particularly deep and fundamental features of the world order. I formulated
an account of necessity according to which modal properties of propositions
come in degrees, and a propositions degree of necessity is determined by the
distance from the actual world to the closest worlds in which the proposition
is false. I argued that this account can accommodate the otherworldliness and
modalist intuitions. Drawing on the account of counterfactuals that I developed
in my (2006), I tried to show that my theory of modality also allows us to give
a plausible account of how the modal properties of propositions are grounded
in their non-modal features. Finally, I argued that my account permits us to
explain why the concept of necessity is of use to us: it facilitates counterfactual
reasoning, by singling out those propositions that play a certain special role in
that practice.
Appendix
I will prove that
(6) A deductively closed set S of true propositions has the property expressed
by the open sentence (2) if and only if the worlds that are analytically
consistent with S form a sphere around the actual world.
As I said in section 2.3 the term actual world in (6) is to be understood in the
non-rigid sense. After proving that (6) is true, I will argue that (6) is metaphysically
necessary.
First, some terminological clarifications. Let us say that two propositions P
and Q are mutually analytically consistent just in case the set containing P, Q and
all conceptual truths is narrowly logically consistent. Let us say that a world w is
analytically consistent just in case the propositions that are true in w are mutually
analytically consistent. (As I say in section 3.3, I wish to remain neutral on the
question whether every world is analytically consistent.) A world w is analytically
consistent with a set S of propositions just in case the propositions that are true
in w are jointly analytically consistent with S. A proposition Q is an analytic
consequence of P just in case Q is a narrowly logical consequence of P and the
set of all conceptual truths. I call a set deductively closed just in case it is closed
under analytic consequence. A proposition Q is cotenable with a proposition P
just in case Q is true and P ! Q.
Suppose that S is a deductively closed set of true propositions. Using the
terminology just introduced, the claim that S has the property expressed by (2)
can be reformulated by saying that S contains all and only those propositions
that are cotenable with all propositions that are analytically consistent with S.
(6) therefore amounts to the following claim: for any deductively closed set D of
true propositions,
(14) D contains all and only the propositions that are cotenable with all
propositions that are analytically consistent with D
if and only if
the worlds that are analytically consistent with D form a sphere around the
actual world.
My proof will make use of a number of assumptions that I find plausible.
Firstly, I will assume that
292 / Boris Kment
(Lindenbaum) For every analytically consistent set of propositions, there is

some analytically consistent world in which all the propositions in the set are true.
In other words, every analytically consistent set of propositions can be embedded
in a maximal analytically consistent set. This assumption seems very plausible to
me. (Thanks to Harold Hodes for making me aware of the fact that I need this
assumption.) Secondly, I will assume that
I argue for principle (8) in section 3.3. I will also use a certain principle of
plenitude for propositions:
(15) For any finite set C of analytically consistent worlds, there is some
proposition that is true in all the worlds in C and in no other analytically
consistent world.
Where P is any proposition or set of propositions, let us use the expression
R P for the class containing all and only the worlds that are analytically consistent
with P. If a world w is analytically consistent with a set D of propositions and
P D, then P cannot be true in w, and so (by the maximality of worlds) P
must be true in w. Hence, if w is analytically consistent with D (i.e. if w is in R D ),
then every proposition in D is true in w.
I will prove the two directions of my demonstrandum separately:
For any deductively closed set D of true propositions, if R D is a sphere around
the actual world, then (14) is true of D.
Proof : Suppose that D is a deductively closed set of true propositions and that R D
is a sphere around the actual world. Let P be any proposition that is analytically
consistent with D. We can use (Lindenbaum) to infer that there are analytically
consistent worlds in which P and all propositions in D are true. That is to say,
there are P-worlds in R D . Since R D is a sphere around the actual world, the
P-worlds in R D must be closer than all other P-worlds. Hence, for any S in D,
there are P & S-worlds (viz. those P-worlds that are in R D ) that are closer to
the actual world than any P & S-world. Hence, P ! S is true. Moreover,
since S is in D, S is true. Hence, S is cotenable with P. We can conclude that
every proposition in D is cotenable with every proposition that is analytically
consistent with D.
Now, let S be some proposition that is not D. Since D is deductively closed
and S is not in D, S cannot be an analytic consequence of D. Hence, S
is analytically consistent with D. Since S is analytically consistent with D,
S must be analytically (self-)consistent. Hence, by (Lindenbaum), there must

be analytically consistent worlds in which S is true. By (8), the analytically
consistent S-worlds are closer than all other S-worlds. Hence, all the closest
S-worlds are analytically consistent worlds. No proposition that is analytically
inconsistent with S is true in any analytically consistent S-world. Hence, no
proposition that is analytically inconsistent with S is true in the closest Sworlds. Hence, S is not true in the closest S-worlds. Hence, S ! S is not true.
So, S is not cotenable with S. Therefore, S is not cotenable with all propositions
that are analytically consistent with D. We can conclude that no proposition that
is not in D is cotenable with all propositions that are analytically consistent with
D. Hence, D contains every proposition that is cotenable with all propositions
that are analytically consistent with D.
This shows that D contains all and only the propositions that are contenable
with all propositions that are analytically consistent with D. Hence, (14) is true
of D.
For any deductively closed set D of true propositions, if (14) is true of D, then
R D is a sphere around the actual world.
Proof : I will prove the contrapositive. Let D be a deductively closed set of true
propositions, and suppose that R D is not a sphere around the actual world. Since
R D is not a sphere, there must be some world w that is not in R D and some
world w D in R D , such that w is no less close to the actual world than w D . Since
w D is an analytically consistent world and w is no less close to the actual world
than w D , it follows by (8) that w, too, is an analytically consistent world. Since
w is both analytically consistent and analytically inconsistent with D, not all the
propositions in D can be true in w. That is, there must be some proposition S
that is in D but is not true in w. By (15), there is a proposition P w,wD that is true
in w and w D and in no other analytically consistent world. The only worlds in
which this P w,wD is true are w, w D , and possibly some analytically inconsistent
worlds. By (8), w and w D (being analytically consistent worlds) are closer to the
actual world than any analytically inconsistent P w,wD -world. Hence, w and w D
are closer to the actual world than any other P w,wD -worlds. Therefore, since w
is no less close to the actual world than w D , w is at least as close to the actual
world as any other P w,wD -world. But S is not true in w. Therefore, S is not true in
all the closest P w,wD -worlds. Hence, P w,wD ! S is false; i.e. S is not cotenable
with P w,wD . Thus, it is not the case that every proposition in D is cotenable
with P w,wD . But there is an analytically consistent world, viz. w D , in which both
P w,wD and the propositions in D are true. Hence, P w,wD is analytically consistent
with D. It is therefore not the case that all propositions in D are cotenable with
every proposition that is analytically consistent with D. Thus, (14) is not true
of D.
Principle (8), with the term actual understood non-rigidly, (Lindenbaum),
and principle (15) can plausibly be regarded as metaphysically necessary. (What
294 / Boris Kment
contingent feature of the world could their truth rest on?) Using necessitated
versions of these three assumptions, we can prove the necessitated version of (6),
i.e. the claim that
(6 N ) It is true in any metaphysically possible world w that a deductive
closed set S of true propositions has the property expressed by (2 ) if
and only if the worlds that are analytically consistent with S from a
sphere around w.
Notes
I am grateful to many philosophers for their comments on various bits and pieces
of this material, including Gordon Belot, Karen Bennett, John Burgess, Jeremy
Butterfield, Cian Dorr, Dorothy Edgington, Adam Elga, Michael Fara, Graeme
Forbes, Delia Graff, Anil Gupta, Gilbert Harman, Harold Hodes, Thomas
Hofweber, Mark Johnston, James Joyce, Thomas Kelly, Philip Kremer, Marc
Lange, Stephan Leuenberger, Eric Lormand, William Lycan, Michael McKinley,
Ram Neta, Jim Pryor, Peter Railton, Nicholas Rescher, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord,
Jonathan Schaffer, Kieran Setiya, Scott Soames, Jamie Tappenden, Fritz Warfield
and Brian Weatherson, as well as to the audiences of talks on the present material
that I gave at Princeton in December 2003, January, April and December 2004,
and at Cornell, Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in January and February 2005, as
well as the students attending a graduate seminar on the material that I gave at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the Fall Term of 2005. My greatest debt
is to Gideon Rosen, who advised me on my dissertation from which this paper
derives. I am also indebted to Neil Mehta for editorial and stylistic suggestions,
many of which I used in revising this paper, and to Jonathan Shaheen and Steve
Campbell for assistance with reading the proofs. Finally, I am grateful to Mind
for the permission to use passages from my (2006) in this paper. The relevant
passages occur in sections 2.2, 2.4, 3.3, 5.1, and 6.
1. For discussions of the point, see Kripke (1980), p. 45, Hazen (1979), pp. 320ff.,
Blackburn (1984), pp. 214f., Hale (1986), p. 77, McFetridge (1990), sct. 2, and
Rosen (1990), pp. 349ff.
2. Here is a typical example, taken from a paper by Edward Craig, in which the
author comments on the fact that conventionalist accounts of necessary truth
once enjoyed widespread popularity:
This popularity can hardly be due to any immediate plausibility or intuitive appeal. Far
from it: there is prima facie an element of paradox about Conventionalism, since [necessary]
truths ... seem to be anything but conventional, and attract attention precisely by their air
of inexorability. (1975, p.1, my emphasis)
3. Because of its association with the conception of necessity as a mode of truth,

the view that takes modal operators as basic is often called modalism.
4. My discussion of the otherworldliness and modalist intuitions, and of the way
they are connected to different choices of modal primitives, owes much to Fine
(1977), pp. 1168.

5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Stalnaker (1968), Lewis (1973), (1986b).

(1997).
This idea was proposed by Lewis in his (1973), sct. 2.5.
(1973), sct. 2.5, McFetridge (1990), pp. 150ff.
Lange (1999), (2004), (2005), Williamson (2005), Kment (dissertation), Hill
(forthcoming).
Fine (1994), p. 3, mentions Mill ((1986), bk. 1, ch. vi, 2) and Moore ((1922), pp.
293, 302) as proponents of this conception. More recent examples include Kripke
(1980), and Forbes (1985), pp. 96-100, among others.
(1994).
For the purposes of this paper, I need a notion of logical truth according to
which all logically true propositions are metaphysically necessary. I believe that
the proposition that I exist is not metaphysically necessary. But this proposition is
a truth of standard first-order logic, since in that logic we can derive it by applying
the rule of universal instantiation to the logical truth that everything exists. In
this paper, I will therefore be operating with a notion of logical truth that is based
on free logic, rather than standard logic.
A situation s counts as maximal if and only if, for every proposition P, either P
or P is true in s.
Lewis (1986a), ch. 1.
When I say that in the two cognitive practices I will describe we consider situations
that we believe not to obtain, I merely mean that among the situations that we
consider in these practices there are some that we believe not to obtain. There
are also cases in which we use these practices to consider situations that we do
believe to obtain.
Lewis (1973), p. 1.
The theoretical framework described is due to Stalnaker (1968) and Lewis (1973).
Other significant work done in that framework includes Jackson (1977), Lewis
(1986b), and Bennett (1984).
Nolan (1997).
While the conception of worlds as sets of propositions is a convenient working
account for our purposes, it ultimately needs to be modified to get around the
objection that maximal collections of propositions are too large to form sets.
Marc Lange ((1999), (2004), (2005)) has developed an account of logical and
nomic necessity in terms of a property very similar to the one expressed by (2).
Lange arrived at his views by a route rather different from mine.
(1977), p.9.
(1986b), p. 34f.
I am not denying that there are also uses of the expression could easily have been
the case that are different from the one considered in this section. I think that
in some contexts, to say that a certain state of affairs could easily have obtained
is simply to say that there was a high chance that it would obtain. But I think
that this cannot be the only meaning of the phrase. Even under determinism,
there are situations in which it is in some sense true to say, of some event that
did not actually happen, that it could easily have happened. If I know that our
team would have won the match if the goalkeeper had stood an inch closer to
the goalpost, then this entitles me to say that we could easily have won the game,
even if I have no idea whether determinism is true. My analysis allows us to make
sense of this fact.
296 / Boris Kment

24. I do not claim that it is the sole function of any of the expressions listed here
to express degrees on the inexorability dimension. I am inclined to think that
the relevant phrases can be used in different ways. But I believe that each of the
phrases has one reading on which it ascribes degrees on the relevant dimension.
25. Needless to say, the word could has a number of functions in English, including
some that are quite different from the one described in this section (some of those
will be considered in section 3.4). But I claim that it is one of the functions of
could to allow us to talk about degrees of inexorability.
26. Lewis (1973), sct. 2.5.
27. McFetridge (1990), Lange (2005).
28. It is commonly assumed that the metaphysical necessities are also nomically
necessary.
29. Fine distinguishes between logical truth and logical necessity in his (2002), pp.
264f.
30. Wittgenstein (1953), 437.
31. I am here using an assumption that I call (Lindenbaum) in the appendix:
for every analytically consistent set of propositions, there is some analytically
consistent world in which all the propositions in the set are true. The assumption
seems very plausible to me. (Thanks to Harold Hodes for making me aware of
the fact that I need this assumption.)
32. See, e.g., Fine (2002), sct. 2, in particular p. 260.
33. David Lewis (1986b) defends the opposite view. Also see Bennett (1984), (2001),
(2003), section 80.
34. The sentence
(A) Aristotle is not a musical performance,
has two readings, depending on whether we give narrow or wide scope to the
negation operator. On the narrow-scope reading, it ascribes to Aristotle the
property of not being a musical performance. On the wide-scope reading, it says
that Aristotle does not have the property of being a musical performance. Now, I
believe that an entity cannot have a property at a world in which it does not exist
(see footnote 39). There are many possible worlds in which Aristotle does not
exist, and it is not true at such worlds that Aristotle has the property of not being
a musical performance. It is, however, true at such worlds that it is not the case
that Aristotle has the property of being a musical performance. The proposition
expressed by (A) on the wide-scope reading is true, that expressed on the narrowscope reading is false in the worlds under consideration. (See Adams (1981).)
I intend the sentence (A) to be given the wide-scope reading. My point is that the
truth of the proposition expressed on this reading does not seem to have a lower
degree of inexorability than that of the proposition that the number 2 exists. I
do not think that it could more easily have been true that Aristotle is a musical
performance than that 2 fails to exist.
35. Fine (2002), pp.254f..
36. Fine (2002), p. 255.
37. Note that the term consists in that I am using here is a hyperintensional,
constitutive idiom: It is necessarily true that a triangle is equilateral just in case it is
equiangular. But its equilaterality does not consist in its equiangularity. Similarly,
to claim that being necessary in one sense consists in the holding of some other
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
kind of necessity is to make a stronger claim than that of necessary equivalence.

I believe, e.g., that it is a necessary truth that a proposition is a nomic necessity
just in case it is metaphysically necessitated by the totality of truths about which
propositions are laws of nature. But this is not to say that its being nomically
necessary consists in its being metaphysically necessitated by the truths about
which propositions are laws. I do not believe the latter claim. Instead, I think that
being nomically necessary consists in being true in all worlds that are no more
than a certain distance away from the actual world.
(1994), pp. 9f.
Thus, I subscribe to the view that an entity can have a property in a world only
if it exists in that world.
I think that it would not have solved the problem if, instead of conditionalizing
the ascriptions of essential properties, we would have maintained that the essential
properties themselves are conditional, e.g. if we had said that it is not the property
of humanity that is essential to Elvis, but the property of being-human-if-existing.
I maintain that Elvis can have no property in a possible world where he does not
exist, not even the property of being-human-if-existing. So, the proposition that
Elvis has the property of being-human-if-he-exists is not true in all possible worlds.
At least this is true if our logic is a free logic, as I suggested in footnote 12 that
it must be.
What about propositions that affirm or deny the identity between things, such as
the propositions expressed by the sentences
(1) Hesperus is Phosphorus,
(2) Hesperus is not Alpha Centauri,
where Hesperus, Phosphorus and Alpha Centauri are understood as directly referential expressions?
I am thinking of propositions as structured entities. The proposition expressed
by a sentence containing a directly referential expression for the entity e is an
object-dependent proposition that contains e as one of its constituents. The objectdependent proposition expressed by (1) contains Hesperus (i.e., Phosphorus) as
constituent twice over. It is therefore of the logical form a = a. It seems plausible
to say that the proposition is true in virtue of having this logical form, and is
in this sense a logical truth. As a logical truth, it is a logical consequence, and
therefore an analytic consequence, of every set of propositions.
Consider next the proposition expressed by (2). This proposition is of the logical
form (a = b), but not of the form (a = a) (since there is no constituent that
occurs twice in it). Every proposition that instantiates the first form but not the
second is a true statement of non-identity, and it seems plausible to me to say
that the proposition under consideration is true in virtue of the relevant two facts
about its logical form. The proposition is a logical truth in the sense of being true
in virtue of its logical form. As a logical truth, it is a logical consequence, and
therefore an analytic consequence, of every set of propositions.
43. This section consists mainly of material from my (2006).
44. For reason which I cannot expand on here (but which I discuss in Kment (MS)),
I think that this account of the closeness relation is a little bit too simple. But I
think that it is a good approximation to the truth, and it can serve as a perfectly
good working account for my purposes.
298 / Boris Kment

45. A causal diagnosis of this kind of our intuitions about relevant examples was
already given in Adams (1975), ch. IV, sct. 8 (in particular pp. 132f.), though it was
not formulated in the closeness framework. Causal diagnoses formulated on the
basis of the closeness account can be found, e.g., in Martensson (1999); Edgington
(2003); Bennett (2003), ch.15, Schaffer (2004), Hiddleston (2005), Kment (2006),
and Wasserman (forthcoming). The different causal diagnoses differ in matters of
detail.
46. The principle is called (c) for causal history.
47. In section 3.3, I said that I believed that laws can have exceptions, in the sense
that a principle L can be a law in a possible world w even if there are exceptions
to L in w. Once we accept such a view, we do not want to rule out the possibility
that there are exceptions to the actual laws in our world. That is, we want to leave
open the possibility that our world does not perfectly conform to all the actual
laws. But even if our world only approximately conforms to a given actual law L,
I think that this approximate conformity can still be explained by the fact that L
is a law.
48. Thanks to Harold Hodes, Marc Lange, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and Thomas
Hofweber for useful discussion of the point.
49. It may be objected that there are similarities in facts with the same explanation that
do not contribute to closeness, for example similarities with respect to disjunctive
facts. (Perhaps it contributes nothing to the closeness between two worlds that
emeralds are grue (i.e. either green and first observed before 2000, or blue and
first observed after 2000) in both of them, even if the explanation of this fact is
the same in the two worlds.) In order to accommodate this point, one might have
to impose some restriction on the range of facts that (C) quantifies over. There
are several ways in which this might be done. Unfortunately, I have no space to
discuss them.
50. I called the principle (C), since it is a generalization of (c) but has a larger scope
(hence the capital letter).
51. By determinism I understand the thesis that any two possible worlds that
perfectly conform to the laws of our world and are alike throughout some extended
initial segment of their histories are alike throughout their histories. (Note that,
on the present assumption that laws can have exceptions, the actual world might
not be among the worlds that perfectly conform to the actual laws.)
If we allow for the possibility that laws have exceptions, then we cannot instead
formulate determinism as the thesis that any two possible worlds that are perfectly
alike throughout some extended initial segment of their histories and which have
the same laws as our world must be alike throughout their histories. If laws can
have exceptions, then this thesis can never be true. For a possible world can have
the same laws as our world and yet not perfectly conform to these laws. Hence,
no matter what the actual laws are like, there will be two possible worlds that have
the same laws as our world and which are alike throughout some extended initial
segment of history that ends at time t, and one of which features a violation of
law after t while the other one does not, so that the two worlds are not entirely
alike throughout their histories.
52. In accordance with (L), I believe that, where L is any law, the fact that L is true
is explained by the fact that L is a law. In other words, on my view the laws are
explained by the fact that they are laws, not by facts about individual events.

53. As I said in section 3.3, I believe that laws of nature can have exceptions. In the
light of this assumption, I need to add some qualification to the claim that the
facts about the history before x, together with the laws of nature, entail that x
obtains. The claim is false in one special case: it could be that the facts about
the history of the world up to the time of x, together with the laws, entail that x
fails to obtain, but that at the time of x some law is violated, so that x obtains
anyway.
54. I agree with Lewis that the closest no-x worlds are worlds that contain tiny
violations of the actual laws, and differ from our world with respect to some
events immediately before the time of x (see Lewis 1986 and my 2006).
55. There are possible cases in which a fact f contributes to explaining another fact
g, and g also contributes to explaining f , e.g. in the case of causal loops. In such
cases I call neither of the two facts explanatorily prior to the other.
56. The principle is called (D) for (explanatory) depth, since it links a facts degree
of explanatory depth to its degree of inexorability.
57. (D) is only a rule of thumb. It is not true without exception that, if f is
explanatorily prior to g, then the closest no-f worlds are farther away from our
world than the closest no-g worlds. Here are two examples of cases that are
exceptions to the principle:
(i) The factors that together explain a certain fact often entail the fact. Let y
be some fact of which this is true, and assume that it is analytically consistent
to suppose that y fails to obtain, so that (given principle (8)) the closest no-y
worlds are analytically consistent worlds. The closest no-y worlds must be worlds
in which some of the facts that actually explain y fail to obtain. Let x be one of
these facts. Given that x contributes to explaining y and assuming that y does not
also contribute to explaining x, x is explanatorily prior to y. But since x fails to
obtain in the closest no-y worlds, it cannot be true that the closest no-x worlds are
farther away than the closest no-y worlds. (The case just considered is represented
in Diagram 3: fact h is explanatorily prior to fact g; but h fails to obtain in the
closest no-g worlds, so that the closest no-h worlds can be no farther away than
the closest no-g worlds.)
(ii) Consider a case of causal over-determination in which A and B are counterfactually independent of each other and are individually sufficient causes of C. In the
closest no-A worlds, B is still present and causes C. Likewise, in the closest no-B
worlds, A is still present and causes C. The closest worlds in which C is absent
are worlds in which neither A nor B is present, and those worlds are farther away
than the closest no-A worlds and the closest no-B worlds. Even though A and B
are explanatorily prior to C, C could less easily have failed to be the case than
either A or B.
58. To be more precise, I do not want to rule out completely the possibility that an
essential property of a thing can be explained by other properties of the thing. It
might be so explicable, but if it is, then the other properties by appeal to which
we can explain it must themselves be essential. (For instance, suppose that it is
essential to Fred that he is a hippopotamus. This property might be explicable by
the fact that Fred originated from sperm Bob and egg Susie, together with the
fact that Bob and Susie are hippopotamus gametes. But note that the property
of Freds that we appeal to in order to explain the fact that he is a hippopotamus
300 / Boris Kment
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
(viz. that of originating from Fred and Susie) is itself an essential property of
Fred.) My thesis is merely that no essential property of an entity can be explained
by an accidental property of the same entity, whereas accidental properties can
often be explained by essential properties. There is a clear explanatory asymmetry
between the essential and the accidental facts about an entity.
As I mentioned in footnote 39, I believe that no entity has properties in any
metaphysically possible world where it does not exist.
Principle (D) constrains what the principles of weighting can be like. But it does
not entail (R M ) or (R N ). There are other sets of principles that we could have used
to weight similarities, and which also conform to the constraint imposed by (D).
Nonetheless, I think that there is something special about a system of rules
that includes (R M ) and (R N ). Every possible system of weights divides up the
facts about our world into different classes and orders these by how weightily it
contributes to the closeness of another world if it shares with the actual world facts
in the relevant classes. Some possible sets of rules rely on classifications of facts
that carve nature at its joints, others rely on more gerrymandered classifications.
As I said, (R M ) and (R N ) are rules of the former kind. They rely on metaphysically
very significant and central classifications of facts, perhaps the most significant
metaphysical distinctions between facts which there are. I conjecture that, of all
the possible principles of weighting that conform to the constraints imposed by
(D), there are none that rest on a metaphysically deeper and more important
classification of facts. In consequence, I surmise that (R M ) and (R N ) optimally
satisfy the desideratum of being easy to apply while conforming to the constraint
imposed by (D).
(1947).
Scts. 57.
This specification of the closeness relation is cast in the same form as Lewiss
well-known formulation in his (1986b), pp. 47f.
Jackson (1977), p. 9.
If the antecedent is analytically inconsistent and we allow for analytically inconsistent worlds, then the closest antecedent-worlds are analytically inconsistent.
In that case, there may be some restriction on the principles of inference that
can be used in the hypothetical reasoning, since some of the inference rules that
are actually valid might be invalid in the closest antecedent-worlds. But if the
antecedent is analytically consistent, then all actually valid principles of inference
are applicable without restriction.
From the perspective of the closeness account, the process of hypothetical
reasoning can be described as follows: Suppose that we want to find out whether
P ! Q is true. This requires us to determine whether the P-worlds closest to
the actual world are Q-worlds. We can do so by applying both our background
knowledge about the actual world and the rules defining the closeness relation to
show that certain true propositions are also true in the closest P-worlds, and by
then reasoning from P and the relevant truths in order to determine whether they
entail Q. If they do, then we can conclude that Q is true in the closest P-worlds
and that P ! Q is therefore true.
This definition is slightly different from the one Goodman originally proposed
((1955), p. 15). On his definition, a proposition P is cotenable with an antecedent

A just in case P is true and it is not the case that P would not have been true if
A had been true.
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Philosophical Perspectives, 20, Metaphysics, 2006

COUNTERFACTUALS AND THE ANALYSIS OF NECESSITY

1. Goals and overview

238 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 239

1.2. Overview of the Project

240 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 241

242 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 243

way. This intuition is naturally accompanied by another: if a certain proposition

244 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 245

2. The Otherworldliness Intuition

246 / Boris Kment

necessary propositions is a deductively closed set of truths. There is therefore a

2.1. The Counterfactual Concept of Truth in a Situation

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 247

using the indicative conditional. When considering the situation as counterfactual,

248 / Boris Kment

This interpretation of (1) is supported, I think, by the fact that there is

2.2. The Analysis of Counterfactuals and the Concept of a Possible World

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 249

250 / Boris Kment

(5) presupposes that there are impossible worlds. That is problematic on a

2.3. Ramsifying out of the Circle

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 251

(2 ) A proposition Q is a member of x if and only if Q is true and, for every

252 / Boris Kment

2.4. The Context-Dependence of Counterfactuals and the

3. The Modalist Intuition

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 253

inexorable in a way in which the truth of contingent propositions is not. This

necessary (could not

I suggested in section 1.1 that the notion of metaphysical necessity arises

254 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 255

256 / Boris Kment

3.2. Modal Properties Come in Degrees

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 257

Explanation, laws of nature, etc.

3.3. Conceptual and Nomic Necessity

258 / Boris Kment

properties that are kinds of necessity. Moreover, it seems plausible that it is an

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 259

nomically possible worlds

According to my account of section 3.1, a true propositions degree of

260 / Boris Kment

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 261

262 / Boris Kment

3.4. Other Modal Notions

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 263

264 / Boris Kment

3.5. A Defense of my Direction of Explanation

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 265

266 / Boris Kment

Now, it seems plausible that to say of a world that it is metaphysically possible

4.1. What Grounds Modal Force?

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 267

quite convincingly in my opinion, against modal definitions of the concepts of

268 / Boris Kment

4.2. Rules of Weighting, and the Definition of Necessity

Counterfactuals and the Analysis of Necessity / 269